Visual Basic® 2008 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 12. Using WPF Controls

The code behind WPF controls is the same as the code behind Windows Forms controls. That means that everything the earlier chapters have explained about applications, forms, controls, Visual Basic code, error handling, drawing, printing, reports, and so forth, still work almost exactly as before.

Chapter 11, "Selecting WPF Controls," briefly describes the most common WPF controls, grouped by category to help you pick the control that best suits a particular task. This chapter provides more detail about WPF. It explains some of the more important concepts that underlie WPF. It also gives more detail about how particular controls work and tells how you can use them in your applications.

WPF is a huge topic. It basically reproduces all of the functionality of Windows Forms programming, and then some. This chapter cannot hope to cover all of the concepts, tools, and techniques used by WPF. Instead, it introduces some of the more important concepts and explains how to build basic WPF forms.

The example programs for this chapter, which are available on the book's web site, demonstrate many of the topics described in this chapter.

Note that the initial build of Visual Basic 2008 introduces a bug in new WPF projects. For more information, see the section "Visual Basic 2008 Version 1 Warning" in the Introduction on page xxxix.

WPF Concepts

WPF applications are similar in concept to Windows Forms applications in many respects. Both display a form or window that contains ...