WPF 4: Features and Improvements
Windows Presentation Foundation (widely know as WPF) is a Microsoft development platform for building rich client applications.
The latest WPF version, WPF 4, brings in numerous new features and improvements at visual and design level that turn a WPF 4 desktop application into a seemingly smooth experience.
Basic traits for the WPF include the XAML, a method for defining UI elements and relationships between UI elements, rich controls and design, and the fact that WPF applications are mostly desktop related or hosted in a web browser (in comparison with Silverlight which is used to create Internet apps).
The core concept around which WPF was designed was the unification of several application services, such as 2D, 3D, vector and raster graphics, advanced typography, fixed and adaptive documents, data binding, animations and user interface.
Released on April, 2010 together with Visual Studio 2010, WPF 4 comes with new features, performance improvements, new graphics and controls.
Below I've detailed the most important improvements and features: Multi-touch In the multi-touch category, Windows 7 includes multi-touch input and manipulation processing and WPF 4 supports it.
Multiple finger input is exposed through existing and new input events, and manipulation and inertia events will be exposed for developers.
So, features in this category include multi-touch manipulation and inertia (pan, zoom, rotate) events on UIElement; raw multi-touch events (up, move, down) on UIElement, UIElement3D and ContentElement; multi capture supporting multiple active controls; ScrollViewer enhancement that supports multi-touch panning; future surface SDK compatibility and touch device extensibility.
Windows 7 Shell Integration WPF 4 includes a number of new Windows 7 Shell features that developers can use to create WPF applications with richer, integrated user experience.
Among these, the taskbar will be less stuffed and will provide more information for one glance.
Aero thumbnails will support user commands and jump lists will provide access to contextual startup tasks and files available to the application.
As such, WPF 4 integrates Windows 7 JumpList functionality, among which there are tasks, items, recent and frequent lists integration and custom categories.
Text enhancement Moving on to the textual component, WPF 4 also includes a new text rendering lot which enables a much lighter and clearer text rendering.
This improvement will enable WPF text to appear almost the same with Windows traditional GDI-rendered text.
Improvements regarding clarity texture also enhance to a great degree the readability for several East Asian languages.
Full-Trust XBAP XBAPs are programs hosted inside a web browser, they run in a "partial trust" sandbox environment and are not granted full access to the resources of the computer and do not include the entire WPF functionality.
This is so because the hosted environment has to protect the computer from malarkey.
In starting an XBAP from a HTML page or the other way around there is no security or installation prompt.
Instead, the application runs in an out-of-process executable different from the browser, although it may seem otherwise.
With the.
NET Framework 3.
5 XBAPs also run in Mozilla Firefox with an XBAP extension, and the main novelty about WPF 4 (part of the new.
NET Framework 4.
0) is that "full-trust" XBAPs can be deployed with the ClickOnce elevation prompt which is enabled for XBAPs in Intranet and Trusted Zones.
For XBAPs that require security grants greater than the minimum code access security (CAS) permission grantset for Intranet and Trsuted Zones, the user may select "Run" in the ClickOnce elevation prompt at the moment they navigate to the XBAP in order to permit the XBAP to run with the requested permission.
The latest WPF version, WPF 4, brings in numerous new features and improvements at visual and design level that turn a WPF 4 desktop application into a seemingly smooth experience.
Basic traits for the WPF include the XAML, a method for defining UI elements and relationships between UI elements, rich controls and design, and the fact that WPF applications are mostly desktop related or hosted in a web browser (in comparison with Silverlight which is used to create Internet apps).
The core concept around which WPF was designed was the unification of several application services, such as 2D, 3D, vector and raster graphics, advanced typography, fixed and adaptive documents, data binding, animations and user interface.
Released on April, 2010 together with Visual Studio 2010, WPF 4 comes with new features, performance improvements, new graphics and controls.
Below I've detailed the most important improvements and features: Multi-touch In the multi-touch category, Windows 7 includes multi-touch input and manipulation processing and WPF 4 supports it.
Multiple finger input is exposed through existing and new input events, and manipulation and inertia events will be exposed for developers.
So, features in this category include multi-touch manipulation and inertia (pan, zoom, rotate) events on UIElement; raw multi-touch events (up, move, down) on UIElement, UIElement3D and ContentElement; multi capture supporting multiple active controls; ScrollViewer enhancement that supports multi-touch panning; future surface SDK compatibility and touch device extensibility.
Windows 7 Shell Integration WPF 4 includes a number of new Windows 7 Shell features that developers can use to create WPF applications with richer, integrated user experience.
Among these, the taskbar will be less stuffed and will provide more information for one glance.
Aero thumbnails will support user commands and jump lists will provide access to contextual startup tasks and files available to the application.
As such, WPF 4 integrates Windows 7 JumpList functionality, among which there are tasks, items, recent and frequent lists integration and custom categories.
Text enhancement Moving on to the textual component, WPF 4 also includes a new text rendering lot which enables a much lighter and clearer text rendering.
This improvement will enable WPF text to appear almost the same with Windows traditional GDI-rendered text.
Improvements regarding clarity texture also enhance to a great degree the readability for several East Asian languages.
Full-Trust XBAP XBAPs are programs hosted inside a web browser, they run in a "partial trust" sandbox environment and are not granted full access to the resources of the computer and do not include the entire WPF functionality.
This is so because the hosted environment has to protect the computer from malarkey.
In starting an XBAP from a HTML page or the other way around there is no security or installation prompt.
Instead, the application runs in an out-of-process executable different from the browser, although it may seem otherwise.
With the.
NET Framework 3.
5 XBAPs also run in Mozilla Firefox with an XBAP extension, and the main novelty about WPF 4 (part of the new.
NET Framework 4.
0) is that "full-trust" XBAPs can be deployed with the ClickOnce elevation prompt which is enabled for XBAPs in Intranet and Trusted Zones.
For XBAPs that require security grants greater than the minimum code access security (CAS) permission grantset for Intranet and Trsuted Zones, the user may select "Run" in the ClickOnce elevation prompt at the moment they navigate to the XBAP in order to permit the XBAP to run with the requested permission.
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