Visual Basic® 2008 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 11. Selecting WPF Controls

One of the largest new additions in Visual Basic 2008 is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF provides a whole new method for building user interfaces. It provides tools for separating the user interface from the code behind the interface so that the two pieces can potentially be built by separate user interface designers and Visual Basic developers. It includes a new Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML, pronounced "zammel") that lets you build a user interface by using declarative statements rather than executable code. XAML lets you determine the size, position, and other properties of the WPF controls on a form. It lets you define styles that can be shared among many controls, and it lets you define transformations and animations that affect the controls.

Actually, WPF was introduced in the .NET Framework version 3.0. You can use WPF and several of the other new technologies with Visual Basic 2005, however this is the first version of Visual Basic that includes WPF, and it has better support integrated for WPF than Visual Basic 2005 has.

As is the case in Windows Forms applications, controls play a central role in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications. They give information to the user (Label, StatusBar TreeView, ListView, Image) and organize the information so that it's easy to understand (Border, StackPanel, DockPanel, TabControl). They enable the user to enter data (TextBox, TextBlock, ComboBox, PasswordBox), select ...