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MS Windows Presentation Foundation
The Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF), formerly code named Avalon, is the
graphical subsystem feature of the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly called WinFX) and
is directly related to XAML . It will be pre-installed in Vista, the next version
of the Microsoft Windows operating system. WPF is also available for installation
on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. It provides a consistent programming
model for building applications and provides a clear separation between the UI and
the business logic. A WPF application can be deployed on the desktop or hosted in
a web browser. It also enables richer control, design, and development of the visual
aspects of Windows programs. It aims to unify a host of application services: user
interface, 2D and 3D drawing, fixed and adaptive documents, vector graphics, raster
graphics, animation, data binding, audio and video.
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.
And this is exactly the aim of WPF-that is, to take advantage of the under-utilized
power of the video card and use it to enhance the user experience of Windows applications.
WPF uses Direct3D for vector-based rendering, enabling applications to incorporate
a wide assortment of media such as 2-D, 3-D, audio, text, video, animation, etc.
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