Fluent C#

19. WPF Graphics

Have you ever noticed that Windows applications tend to look very much alike? I won’t say they’re boring, but it’s unusual to see the kind of variety you’ll find on the Web, for example. There are a few standard layouts, and all the controls look almost identical.

It isn’t that the designers of these applications lack the imagination to build innovative interfaces or graphic designs; it’s that until the release of Windows Presentation Foundation, making significant changes to a control was really, really hard. Even changing the appearance of an application was difficult, because most of the standard controls only exposed a few appearance properties. so it was almost impossible to get a consistent appearance if you strayed too ...