Frameworks
Return to WPF
Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio-Expression return focus to Windows Presentation Foundation.
Is it time to pay attention again to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)? I started wondering this a few weeks back, as the excitement over Silverlight and sundry rich Internet application (RIA) frameworks crested and the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 pulled our attention back to the desktop.
If you remember, WPF was going to change ... well, everything. WPF was going to unify 2-D and 3-D graphics. It was going to make once-dull Windows Forms-style applications come alive. Our whites would be whiter, our brights brighter.
The future of WPF development promised a land of unicorns, lollipops and candy mountains.
But a funny thing happened on the way to WPF. A couple funny things, actually. One, Windows Vista flopped in the corporate market, stunting (or at least delaying) the implied value of WPF as a development target. And two, Microsoft took more than a year to deliver the tooling to enable WPF-based development. I think we all can agree that forcing programmers to write Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) code by hand is no way to kick off a graphics development revolution.
Which is why every .NET developer worth his or her salt ought to be paying close attention now. Visual Studio 2008 is here. The Expression Studio suite is here. The tooling and interfaces to craft kick-ass WPF code are finally (yes, finally) here.
And the best news is, they rock.
I've been talking to component vendors who make a living getting ahead of the curve so they can deliver pre-built bits for independent developers, and their feedback has been emphatic. The tools in Visual Studio 2008 to build WPF-based applications work. What's more, those tools work extremely well with Expression Blend and Expression Design, the software that UI designers can use to create fully functional WPF-enabled program interfaces.
The neat thing about the Visual Studio-Expression pair is that both toolsets speak the same language -- XAML. So when a designer draws out a program interface using the visual tools in Expression Blend, for example, it's not just a static bitmap image that developers must make sense of. The design is expressed entirely in XAML, which Visual Studio 2008 can open and manipulate natively as a development project.
So whether you're looking to add visual impact to applications, or seek a way to streamline the design-development process,
WPF at last offers a path to get you there. Which is why, more than a year after .NET 3.0 and WPF hit the streets, it's finally time to pay attention (again) to WPF.
Have you been waiting patiently to take a crack at WPF? If you've started working with it, write me with your impressions and let me know how you will (or won't) make use of WPF in your application development.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine and former editor in chief of Redmond Developer News. He has served
as senior editor of news at PC World and executive editor at Multimedia
World magazine, and has written for dozens of publications and Web sites.
Desmond has also written four computing books, including Microsoft
Office 2003 in 10 Simple Steps or Less.