Professional Visual Studio 2013

Chapter 18Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Learning the basics of XAML
• Creating a WPF application
• Styling your WPF application
• Hosting WPF content in a Windows Forms project
• Hosting Windows Forms content in a WPF project
• Using the WPF Visualizer

When starting a new Windows client application in Visual Studio, you have two major technologies to choose from — a standard Windows Forms–based application, or a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)–based application. Both are essentially a different API for managing the presentation layer for your application. WPF is extremely powerful and flexible, and was designed to overcome many of the shortcomings and limitations of Windows Forms. In many ways you could consider WPF a successor to Windows Forms. However, WPF’s power and flexibility comes with a price in the form of a rather steep learning curve because it does things quite differently than Windows Forms.

This chapter guides you through the process to create a basic WPF application in Visual Studio 2013. It’s beyond the scope of this book to cover the WPF framework in any great detail — it would take an entire book to do so. Instead, what you see is an overview of Visual Studio 2013’s capabilities to help you rapidly build user interfaces using XAML.

WHAT IS WPF?

Windows Presentation Foundation is a presentation framework for Windows. But what makes WPF unique, and why should you consider using it over Windows Forms? Whereas Windows Forms uses ...