C# Tutorial - Windows Presentation Foundation
WPF is a set of libraries that have all functionality you need to build, run, execute, and manage Windows Vista applications. The WPF engine is responsible for creating, displaying, and manipulating user-interfaces, documents, images, movies, and media in Windows Vista.
What this means is that whereas .NET 2.0 uses several APIs to create full fledge applications, .NET 3.0 uses a single API. This can be shown in the following table:
| Desired Functionality | .NET 2.0 Solution | .NET 3.0 Solution |
| Creating Forms with Controls | Windows Forms | WPF |
| 2D Graphics | GDI+(System.Drawing.dll) | WPF |
| 3D Graphics | DirectX API | WPF |
| Streaming Video | Windows Media Player API | WPF |
A WPF application is made up of two parts; a new descriptive programming language called XAML that is used to write the user interfaces and the normal C# or Visual Basic code that does the work behind the user interface. So this means that the look and feel of the Windows application can be cleanly separated from the programming logic that drives it. This separation allows the UI to be created by a graphic designer using packages such as Expression Blend and the code behind to be created by a software engineer.
WPF Examples
A nice simple example of a calculator can be found at http://feebdack.com/wpfcalculator.
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