Chapter 8. Modern UI Frameworks (WPF and Silverlight)
Because software projects can allow less and less neglect when designing the user experience, new technologies are emerging to help create a new generation of applications. This chapter discusses the shift of focus in the software industry toward user experience (UX), and introduces you to Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) — the two technologies that can help developer teams make this shift while enhancing development productivity, even for traditional line-of-business (LOB) applications.
THE IMPORTANCE OF USER EXPERIENCE
Software development is changing. Ten years ago, the challenges developer teams faced were mostly technical. For example, it was very difficult to create a client-server application.
On the server side, functional SQL database servers already existed, but transferring data to the business logic required writing a lot of repetitive code. The most popular programming languages for the Microsoft platform were Visual Basic and C++ — neither of which was ideal for expressing complex business logic. Even Visual Basic 6.0 was not a real object-oriented language, and C++ was often too complex for the task at hand. When it came to performance though, C++ was the clear winner.
On the client side, things were slightly better. For a rich client, Visual Basic 6.0 was a good rapid application development (RAD) choice to display the user interface (UI), and, with decent tooling support, teams were fairly productive, ...
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