WPF stands for Windows Presentation Foundation. From its name we can conclude that it is for building windows applications. It is introduced in .Net framework 3.0.
Main usage of WPF is to provide rich graphical interface.
So to make it easy to remember and understand we can summerize WPF in the below points :
- Its full form is Windows Presentation Foundations
- It is a graphical subsysten developed by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in window based applications
- Available in .Net Framework 3.0 and higher
- It internally uses DirectX
- It uses Hardware rendering
Advantages of WPF
- WPF has a very rich UI which is relatively very easy to develop and understand then Winforms.
- It comes with many additional tools so there is no need to go for 3rd party tools.
- It uses hardware acceleration for rendering the UI controls, because of this the performance enhanced to a great extent.
- WPF uses XAML for UI representation and XAML internally represent data in XML Format. So the same Windows GUI (XAML Code) can be reuse to WPF browser application (Web) as well as Mobile applications.
- With the introduction of WPF, Binding become easy than before. Now we can very easily bind one control to another control in the application.
- Moreover animations are very easy to implement because it provides many rich UI Controls for animation and you can also use Expression Blend for animation and designing.
- WPF is skinable means you can change the appearance of any control to something different. For example you know a button display text/content in it but you can display image as its content. Let us take one more example you can have a listbox containing not text as items but images, so the functionality will remain intact of listbox or of the original control but the appearance or look is changed.