WPF 4: Features and Improvements
Website design By BotEap.comWindows Presentation Foundation (widely known as WPF) is a Microsoft development platform for creating rich client applications. The latest version of WPF, WPF 4, brings many new features and visual and design enhancements that turn a WPF 4 desktop application into a seemingly seamless experience.
Website design By BotEap.comThe core features of WPF include XAML, a method for defining UI elements and relationships between UI elements, rich controls and layout, and the fact that WPF applications are in mostly desktop-related or hosted in a web browser (compared to Silverlight, which is used to build Internet applications). The central concept around which WPF was designed was the unification of various application services, such as 2D, 3D, vector, and raster graphics, advanced typography, fixed and responsive documents, data binding, animations, and user interface.
Website design By BotEap.comReleased in April 2010 along with Visual Studio 2010, WPF 4 comes with new features, performance improvements, new graphics, and controls. Next, I detail the most important improvements and features:
Website design By BotEap.commultitouch
Website design By BotEap.comIn the multi-touch category, Windows 7 includes multi-touch input and tamper processing, and WPF 4 supports it. Multi-finger input is exposed through existing and new input events, and inertia and manipulation events will be exposed to developers.
Website design By BotEap.comTherefore, functions in this category include multi-touch manipulation and inertial events (pan, zoom, rotate) on the UIElement; raw multi-touch events (up, move, down) on UIElement, UIElement3D and ContentElement; multi capture supporting multiple active controls; ScrollViewer enhancement to support multi-touch panning; Future Surface SDK support and extensibility for touch devices.
Website design By BotEap.comWindows 7 shell integration
Website design By BotEap.comWPF 4 includes a number of new features in the Windows 7 Shell that developers can use to build WPF applications with a richer, more integrated user experience. Among these, the taskbar will be less cluttered and provide more information at a glance. Aero thumbnails will support user commands and shortcut lists will provide access to contextual startup tasks and files available to the application. As such, WPF 4 integrates Windows 7 JumpList functionality, including tasks, items, recent and frequent list integration, and custom categories.
Website design By BotEap.comtext enhancement
Website design By BotEap.comMoving on to the text component, WPF 4 also includes a new text rendering bundle that allows for much lighter and clearer text rendering. This enhancement will allow WPF text to appear almost the same as traditional Windows GDI text. Improvements related to texture clarity also greatly improve readability for various East Asian languages.
Website design By BotEap.comFull Trust XBAP
Website design By BotEap.comXBAPs are programs hosted within a web browser, run in a “partial trust” sandbox environment, and are not granted full access to computer resources and do not include all of WPF functionality. This is so because the hosted environment has to protect the computer from malarkey. When launching an XBAP from an HTML page or the other way around, there is no security or installation prompt. Instead, the application runs in a different out-of-process executable than the browser, even though it may appear otherwise.
Website design By BotEap.comWith the .NET Framework 3.5, XBAPs also run on Mozilla Firefox with an XBAP extension, and the main new thing in WPF 4 (part of the new .NET Framework 4.0) is that “full trust” XBAPs can be implemented with the flag ClickOnce elevation that is enabled for XBAPs in intranet and trusted zones. For XBAPs that require security grants greater than the minimum set of code access security (CAS) permissions for Intranet and Trusted Zones, the user can select “Execute” at the ClickOnce elevation prompt at the time of browsing to the XBAP to enable the XBAP. run with the requested permission.