Professional Visual Basic® 2010 and .NET 4
by Bill Sheldon, Billy Hollis, Jonathan Marbutt, Gastón C. Hillar, Rob Windsor, Kent Sharkey
Chapter 16. User Controls Combining WPF and Windows Forms
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER
The Windows Forms Integration Library
Using WPF controls in Windows Forms
Using Windows Forms controls in WPF
Integration library limitations
Chapter 15 looked at advanced features of Windows Forms. One of these features goes well beyond Windows Forms: user controls. User controls are used in Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, and Silverlight. The concepts around user controls reflect a best practice for encapsulating application logic within a reusable component. Within an application, smaller components that encapsulate functionality and communicate via a method such as events provide a robust architecture. This chapter acts as a bridge to the next chapter which deals with WPF and also references using a user control.
The same concept is used to provide a migration path from Windows Forms to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF was first introduced in .NET 3.0 as Microsoft's next-generation solution to graphical user-interface development. In terms of user interfaces, the transition to this new model will be similar in significance and paradigm shift to the shift from COM-based Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET. The core paradigms and syntax familiar to developers of Windows applications are changing, and most of the changes are not backwardly compatible.
As a result, developers will need to transition existing application source code to a new technology paradigm. Perhaps not this year or next, ...
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