Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

The Windows Presentation Foundation Platform

As a brand-new presentation layer framework, WPF brings a lot of new concepts and new coding territory with it—and can represent a fairly significant learning curve for developers. But let’s take a brief look at the overall architecture of the WPF platform, and then dissect the programming model.

Physically, WPF is implemented with a series of three .DLLs:

• WindowsBase.dll

• PresentationFramework.dll

• PresentationCore.dll

Every presentation layer framework has to eventually paint pixels onto a screen, and WPF is no different. Implemented within its binaries is a composition and rendering engine, which talks to your hardware through DirectX. In addition to the rendering layers, there is also obviously ...