WPF

Origins – Who, When, Where  Who? Microsoft  When? November 2006  Where? Windows Vista Windows Server 2003 Windows XP Service Pack 2

What  Application development framework .NET 3.0 graphical subsystem  Codenamed Avalon  Web-transportable subset (Silverlight)

Why  Features Media – video, animation, images, documents Effects – shadows, blurs, transparencies, etc. Data binding  Design (XAML) Unified, language-agnostic modeling View / logic separation – “code-behind”  Performance 2D / 3D hardware acceleration

How – Layers Presentation Framework End-user presentation – layouts, animations, data binding Presentation Core Properties, dependencies, dispatchers Common Language Runtime.NET virtual machine DirectX Hardware Accel. User32 Legacy system Media Integration 3D, animations Codecs Media codecs

How – Internal Structure  Document Object Model (DOM) Eg. JavaScript’s HTML DOM Tree of Visual Objects ○ Rendering details (transparencies, clipping, etc.)  Dependency Objects Event-driven behaviour triggers  Declarative Programming (XAML) eXtensible Application Markup Language

How – Thread Responsibilities  Media Integration Layer (MIL) Background thread Periodically traverses DOM ○ Painter’s Algorithm ○ Caches, buffers and renders elements  UI Manager Priority-sorted Dispatcher queue GUI functionality only ○ Like SwingWorkers and Event Dispatch Thread

XAML  eXtensible Application Markup Language  Like the eXtensible UI Language (XUL)  XML-based eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) OpenDocument Format (ODF) Office Open XML (OOXML -.docx,.xlsx,.pptx) eXtensible Presentation Format (XPF) Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

XML Advantages  Dominant document model language Readable and generic  XQuery (XML Query Language) Set of all colours used ○ Average count of buttons per window ○ count(//button)  XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) XSLT (XSL Transform)

Development  Microsoft Expression Blend The artist [tool] formerly known as Sparkle Artist-friendly development ○ No Photoshop / UI translation Searchable components Scalable modules Scrollable panel container

Assignment  Install Microsoft Expression Blend trial \\ \4870\blend.msi  Create GUI in design mode GridSplitter Rectangle, featuring ○ Rounded corners ○ Angled gradients ○ Transparency ○ Borders  View and comment XAML