Professional Visual Basic® 2010 and .NET 4

Chapter 17. WPF Desktop Applications

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• The WPF strategy

• Why you should use WPF

• Creating a WPF application

• Implementing a custom WPF application

• Dynamic properties

• Customizing the user interface

• Data binding

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) — previously known as Avalon — is the next-generation presentation library and development paradigm for user interfaces. It was introduced with Windows Vista as a key architectural component in the .NET 3.0 Framework. This chapter introduces you to the WPF programming model and discusses key elements you'll need to know in order to work with WPF. Rest assured you will be creating applications that leverage the features of WPF in the future. Visual Studio introduces a fully enabled development environment for creating and customizing WPF-based applications.

The libraries that make up WPF were released in conjunction with the release of Windows Vista — not the commercial and much-publicized public launch of Vista in January 2007, but the initial release of Vista to enterprise partners in November 2006. The libraries shipped with Vista and coincidentally with Microsoft Office 2007, but what you may have noticed at the time was the lack of development tools.

However, with Visual Studio 2010, there are tools for not only the .NET 4 libraries, but also for all of the .NET 3.0 libraries. In fact, one of the main focuses of Visual Studio 2010 is the introduction of a WPF-based user interface and better support for developing ...