Visual Basic® 2010 Programmer's Reference

Appendix H. WPF Controls

This appendix lists the most useful Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) controls that are available in the .NET Framework 4, and briefly describes their purposes. This list does not include all of the hundreds of classes that WPF defines; it lists only the tools most likely to appear in the window designer's Toolbox.

These controls are part of the System.Windows.Controls namespace. In contrast, the controls used in Windows Forms are contained in the System.Windows.Forms namespace. Many of the controls in the two namespaces serve very similar purposes, although they have different capabilities. For example, both namespaces have buttons, labels, combo boxes, and check boxes but only the System.Windows.Controls classes provide foreground and background brushes, render transformations, complex content, and XAML-defined triggers.

This appendix describes the WPF controls in far less detail than Appendix G describes the Windows Forms controls. This is mostly due to space constraints, not because the WPF controls are inferior. These controls can do some amazing things that the Windows Forms controls cannot, such as containing other controls as content and applying transformations while drawing. Unfortunately, these new features would take at least a few hundred pages to cover in depth, and there just isn't room in this edition of the book to do them justice.

For much more information about WPF controls and WPF in general, see my book WPF Programmer's Reference (Stephens, ...