Summary

One of the main goals of WPF is to separate the user interface more completely from the code behind it. XAML lets you declaratively build a user interface, and then later add code to handle the events that any Windows application needs to perform. Because the user interface is separate from the code, you can assign different developers to work on each of them. You can have a graphics designer use a graphical XAML editor to build the user interface, and have a Visual Basic developer write the underlying code. Later, the graphical designer can modify the user interface without forcing you to rewrite the code.

WPF also includes hundreds of new objects for defining user interfaces. These objects let you build windows that take advantage of modern computer graphics hardware, and can provide such advanced features as translucency and rotated controls. New drawing objects produce complex graphics in two and three dimensions.

Resources and styles let you customize objects so that they are easy to change in a central location. Triggers, animations, and storyboards let the interface interact with the user at a very high level, so the bulk of your code doesn’t need to handle these more cosmetic chores.

New document objects let you display information that can flow to take best advantage of the available space, or that remain in fixed positions on any display device. Powerful document viewers let users scroll through documents, zoom in and out, print, and copy data to the clipboard.

WPF provides a huge number of powerful new features, and this chapter barely scratches the surface.

A few chapters up to this point have shown how to interact with the operating system. Chapter 13 explains how a Visual Basic program can interact with other programs through drag and drop and the clipboard. Chapter 24 shows how a program can use the system’s printer.

The chapters in the next part of the book explain more ways a program can interact with the system. Chapter 27 describes some of the ways that a Visual Basic program can store configuration and resource values for use at runtime. Some of the most useful of these include environment variables, the Registry, configuration files, and resource files.