Essential Windows Presentation Foundation

5. Visuals

IN COVERING THE concepts of Windows Presentation Foundation, we’ve looked at applications and how UIs are built from a set of controls, as well as how we can use layout to determine the positioning of those controls. The next step on our journey is to talk about the inner workings of the controls—specifically, how the display is created for those controls. Eventually all controls boil down to creating a set of visuals that display pixels on the screen.

A fundamental design principle in the development of WPF was integration. We wanted a single stack of technology that could solve a broad range of customer scenarios—from traditional user interfaces, to documents, to media. We can see this tenet woven throughout the stack, but it comes ...