Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Hello, WPF

WPF is a completely new presentation framework, integrating the capabilities of many frameworks that have come before it, including User, GDI, GDI+, and HTML, as well as being heavily influenced by toolkits targeted at the Web, such as Adobe Flash, and popular Windows applications like Microsoft Word. This chapter will give you the basics of WPF from scratch, and then a whirlwind tour of the things you'll read about in detail in the chapters that follow.

WPF from Scratch

Example 1-1 is pretty much the smallest WPF "application" you can write in C#.

Example 1-1. Minimal C# WPF application

// MyApp.cs
using System;
using System.Windows; // the root WPF namespace
namespace MyFirstWpfApp {
  class MyApp {
    [STAThread]
    static void Main(  ) {
     // the WPF message box
     MessageBox.Show("Hello, WPF");
    }
  }
}

Tip

The STAThread attribute signals .NET to make sure that when COM is initialized on the application's main thread, it's initialized to be compatible with single-threaded UI work, as required by WPF applications.

In fact, this is such a lame WPF application that it doesn't even use any of the services of WPF; the call to MessageBox.Show is just an interop call to Win32. However, it does require the same infrastructure required of other WPF applications, so it serves as a useful starting point for our explorations.

Building Applications

Building this application (Example 1-2) is a matter of firing off the C# compiler from a command shell with the appropriate environment variables. ...