Windows Developer Power Tools

3.1 Creating Great Visuals for Your Applications with Expression Graphic Designer

Windows Presentation Foundation—the new Windows presentation subsystem designed to take advantage of today’s graphics hardware and enable richer visual applications—dramatically changes what is possible for your applications’ user interfaces. As part of stepping up to the more advanced graphics devices, WPF’s internals offer tremendous support for vector graphics.

Tip

Vector graphics use geometric shapes such as lines, polygons, and curves to draw shapes. Vector graphics are much more easily scaled and stretched than bitmap (raster) graphics, and they display much better on higher-resolution devices. Bitmap graphics are simply made up of dots (pixels), and they don’t scale well or look particularly good on high-end systems.

With WPF, vector-based graphics become important for creating a unique and scalable user experience. Whether you’re developing a Web or Windows Forms application, you’ll need a powerful image editor to create your graphics and ease the move to vector-based graphics.

Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer is a full-featured image editor that supports both vector- and bitmap-based graphics. It also includes many image-editing functions, such as image filters and effects and the ability to stitch together multiple photos into one large image. Images can be saved to many common formats or exported as XAML.

Tip

XAML is a new XML-based language that allows graphics and user interface elements ...