Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML
Windows Presentation Foundation
Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsoft's unified presentation subsystem for Windows, and is exposed through WinFX. It consists of a display engine and a managed-code framework. Windows Presentation Foundation unifies how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and user interface (UI), enabling developers and designers to create visually stunning, differentiated user experiences.
Windows Presentation Foundation will also be available on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and all future releases of the Windows operating system.
Windows Presentation Foundation consists of two main parts: the engine and the programming framework.
The Windows Presentation Foundation (short: WPF) engine unifies the way developers and designers experience documents, media, and UI, providing a single runtime for browser-based experiences, forms-based applications, graphics, video, audio, and documents. You will be able to use the full power of your current graphics hardware, and youwill be able to exploit future advances in hardware. For example, WPF's vector-based rendering engine enables applications to scale to take advantage of high-DPI monitors without requiring extra work on the part of the developer or user. Similarly, when WPF detects a video card that supports hardware acceleration, it will take advantage of it.
The Windows Presentation Foundation framework helps you to create media, user interface design, and documents that go far beyond what developers have today. WPF is designed to be extensible, so for example you can create your own controls on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation engine "from the ground up" or by subclassing existing controls.
Central to the Windows Presentation Foundation framework are controls for shapes, documents, images, video, animation, 3D and "panels" in which to place controls and content. These "primitives" provide the building blocks for developing next-generation user experiences.
At the same time Microsoft introduces Windows Presentation Foundation, it will also introduce XAML, a markup language to declaratively represent user interface for Windows applications, improving the richness of the tools with which developers and designers can compose and repurpose UI. If you are a web developer, many concepts introduced in XAML will look familiar to you. XAML also enables the separation of UI design from the underlying code. Developers and designers can work more closely together, without interfering with each others work.
Windows Presentation Foundation's integrates forms, documents, video, 3D, and more. It becomes feasible to create user-experiences unlike anything seen (or affordable) today.
For developers and designers, Windows Presentation Foundation provides a unified UI platform, so that they can learn a single paradigm with limitless possibilities for UI experiences. For .NET developers, its framework will be familiar, and it will ultimately reduce the number of lines of. For designers, Windows Presentation Foundation offers a platform that eliminates boundaries between content, media, and applications.
Most importantly, Windows Presentation Foundation has been engineered so that developers and designers can work closely together to quickly deliver differentiated, connected experiences.
XAML
XAML is an XML-based markup language that can be used to declaratively program the Windows Presentation Foundation object model. It is especially useful for implementing your application's UI. Each XAML tag corresponds to an object model class. A tag also usually has a collection of attributes that corresponds to the properties of the tag's associated class. At compile time, the parser converts the XAML into a partial class that contains equivalent procedural code. Each XAML tag becomes an instance of the corresponding object model class, and the tag's attribute values are assigned to the corresponding object properties. Then the partial class that is created from the parsed XAML is combined with the page's code-behind file by the common language runtime compiler to create an object for the page.
For additional information on Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML, visit the Windows Presentation Foundation section of the Windows Vista Developers Center.
Browsing photos "Halo" style. See this in action here, if you just want to see just the demo scroll forward to 49:30.
A one hour tour of XAML by the development team:
Joe Marini - Why I love XAML
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