Just like me, most of us will be wondering what’s so new with WPF.
Why there is a big buzz for it? How come it’s much powerful than the current winforms?
Well. To get it, first we need to understand the technology behind current winforms, especially the windows graphics. Windows application relies on two significant parts of windows operation system.
User32: for look and feel.
GDI/GDI+: For rendering
Over the last decade, windows have come up with various technologies like VB, VC++ and.NET framework. Though this technologies provided developers with new API’s for access windows graphics, these API’s acted as a wrapper on the existing User32 and GDI/GDI+ API’s. Hence, so far, we are using the same technology which was developed decades ago.
In the meanwhile, one can see a huge development in graphics rendering in game arena. If you are a normal user, you will be wondering how Microsoft was able to achieve it. Microsoft over came the limitation of user32 and GDI by means of DirectX. MS closely worked with graphics card vendors to create DirectX whose design mandate was speed.
Well, but why am I talking about DirectX here. So far, DirectX was a game developer’s toolkit. But WPF is going to use DirectX as it rendering engine.
Moreover, WPF is intelligent enough. The rendering work is offloaded on graphic process located in graphic card instead of CPU.
If you are a gamer, you can very well understand the power of DirectX. Now we can harness it for traditional windows application. So I leave it to your imagination what WPF is capable of.
