Pro WPF in C# 2010: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 4

Chapter 14. Effects and Visuals

In the previous two chapters, you explored the core concepts of 2-D drawing in WPF. Now that you have a solid understanding of the fundamentals—such as shapes, brushes, transforms, and drawings—it's worth digging down to WPF's lower-level graphics features.

Usually, you'll turn to these features when raw performance becomes an issue, or when you need access to individual pixels (or both). In this chapter, you'll consider three WPF techniques that can help you out:

• Visuals. If you want to build a program for drawing vector art, or you plan to create a canvas with thousands of shapes that can be manipulated individually, WPF's element system and shape classes will only slow you down. Instead, you need a leaner approach, ...