Among the numerous new technologies in Vista is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly codenamed Avalon). This article takes you on a whirlwind tour of WPF and shows how you can start preparing for Vista by developing applications today using the available SDK.
by Wei-Meng Lee
May 1, 2006
indows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the new graphics subsystem in Windows Vista that will enable developers to build applications that provide breakthrough user experiences. If you look at the applications in use today, they are either Windows applications or Web applications. While Windows applications offer immensely rich client functionality, deploying Windows applications requires considerable resources and makes maintenance a constant challenge. On the other hand, Web applications offers ease of deployment and maintenance, but do so at the expense of increased complexity in the development process (since the Web is stateless) as well as less-than-ideal platform integration.
Microsoft's goal when they created WPF was to offer a development platform that offers the best of both worlds, allowing administrators to deploy and manage applications securely.
While application development technologies have evolved rapidly, hardware advances have also been moving at a rapid rate. In particular, the processing power of video cards has been improving at a much more rapid rate than developers can make use of. Increasingly, computers are equipped with an over-powered graphics subsystem that is under utilized. Applications could jolly well take advantage of the power of these graphics cards (such as for three-dimensional (3-D) processing) to enhance the user experience.
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indows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the new graphics subsystem in Windows Vista that will enable developers to build applications that provide breakthrough user experiences. If you look at the applications in use today, they are either Windows applications or Web applications. While Windows applications offer immensely rich client functionality, deploying Windows applications requires considerable resources and makes maintenance a constant challenge. On the other hand, Web applications offers ease of deployment and maintenance, but do so at the expense of increased complexity in the development process (since the Web is stateless) as well as less-than-ideal platform integration.
