Essential Windows Presentation Foundation

2. Applications

WE EACH HAVE our own definition of what an application is; my favorite is “a piece of software whose primary function is to communicate with a human.” Windows Presentation Foundation is fundamentally about presenting information to humans, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that I believe the right place to start digging into this enormous platform is at the application level.

WPF tries to walk a fine line with its application model, providing a set of flexible services for building applications without introducing such rigid rules that new solutions cannot be built. The model was to provide a set of integrated services that developers could take advantage of incrementally.

WPF applications consist of various pieces of user interface, ...