Hello everyone, hope you are having a wonderful week, as we are just a few hours away from enjoying the weekend. My suggestion is, soak up whatever we have left from the sun for this season, visit the countryside, or hike a mountain you haven’t visited yet. This is Jordan from SnapStack Solutions, and this week I am coming forward with a topic from the desktop applications world.
You should check at Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) if you haven\’t already. WPF is a fantastic desktop programming environment. Granted, not all of the tools are ready yet, but Microsoft is investing millions of dollars in WPF development. Windows Forms is currently considered a legacy technology by Microsoft, and it will not be updated within Visual Studio.
These two arguments should be plenty to persuade you to begin learning WPF right away. While WPF introduces a new set of development tools, you\’ll notice a lot of what you\’re used to. Text boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, and other desktop controls are still available. You continue to write C# or Visual Basic code.
The main differences are in how you structure the displays and manage the appearance and feel of the controls, as well as some of the characteristics. Without going into too much detail, this article will offer you a solid overview of what WPF is all about.
Text boxes, combo boxes, radio buttons, and other user interface components are described in XAML, an XML-based language. XAML is also used to specify how styles are applied to these components. Styles regulate things like width, height, color, and so on. The way you declare controls in ASP.NET apps is quite similar to how you create controls in XAML. If you\’re used to working with ASP.NET, you\’ll be right at home with XAML.
Remember when you used to write traditional ASP applications? Do you recall combining code with HTML? Remember how much easier it was to have a declarative syntax for controls when ASP.NET was released? The same may be said with XAML. To construct controls on a Windows Form design surface, you no longer need to utilize procedural code in a partial class. You\’ve now got a declarative syntax. To create a text box control, use the XAML below.
XAML, often known as Silverlight, is the way of the future for desktop development and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Not just for control declarations, but also for actions, XAML is employed. Animation, graphics, data binding, and multi-media may all be expressed with XAML code. When using these approaches in your apps, using XAML will drastically minimize the amount of code you need to write.
Changing the appearance and feel of a typical Windows Forms application needed a lot of rework and a strong relationship between a programmer and a designer. WPF is a departure from the norm. A programmer may arrange the fundamental controls in about any arbitrary manner and get the code to operate. Then, without affecting any of the back-end code, a designer may come in and entirely rearrange the controls, adding color, images, and any other features.
As an external resource, you may design all of the styles and even whole themes for a WPF application. This means you can modify the appearance and feel of an app without having to recompile your code! With a standard Windows Forms application, this would be a difficult task.
Microsoft also employs XAML in Silverlight apps, as I previously said. Silverlight is a cross-browser platform from Microsoft that lets you build rich Internet applications (RIAs) with the same declarative vocabulary as WPF. Silverlight uses a reduced subset of the XAML language accessible on desktops, although the XAML syntax is the same as WPF.
WPF was created by Microsoft to flexibly couple presentations and business logic. In your development, you may leverage design patterns like Model View Controller (MVC) or Model View View Model (MVVM) thanks to this architecture. These patterns not only help you isolate your business logic from your user interface but also allow you to unit test every line of code in your app. While Windows Forms allows you to separate business logic and user interface, WPF\’s hooks make this separation considerably easier.
While the animation is rarely required for many business applications, there are few instances where a well-designed (and usually brief) animation may assist the user and alert them to something on the screen that they might otherwise overlook. This type of animation makes your software more user-friendly and self-documenting. Simple animations are a breeze using WPF. In fact, you can often describe motion with XAML without having to write any traditional VB or C# code.
Of course, no new development paradigm will gain traction unless third-party suppliers and the programming community as whole support it. WPF is supported by a big community and several third-party providers. At CodePlex.com, you\’ll find a wealth of code examples as well as essential tools like the WPF Toolkit and WPF Power Toys. Make sure to acquire these two WPF add-ons since they have some fantastic controls that will help you swiftly program your commercial apps. The WPF DataGrid in the WPF Toolkit is quite useful to me. The WPF DataGrid control will be included in the.NET Framework 4.0.
I can think of a lot more reasons why you should use WPF as your desktop development platform than the ones I\’ve listed here. The separation of UI and code that Microsoft has achieved with the XAML language, WPF, Silverlight, Visual Basic, and C# is one of the main causes. I hope you\’ll be able to visit WPF in the near future.
Apart from working on web applications, embedded solutions, and mobile apps, at SnapStack Solutions, we are also developing desktop applications. If you are in need of such solutions, or you need resources that are experts in WPF, please let us know at contact@snapstack.cz or on social media.
Have a great weekend ahead!
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