A Potentially Informative Article about the WPF Engine

Preface

This article overviews WPF's graphics capabilities, including two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes, fonts, and animations. The writer would like to stress that this article is for beginners. The reason why I am writing this article is because WPF integrates drawing and animation features that were previously available only in special libraries (such as Microsoft GDI+ and DirectX). The graphics system in WPF is designed for your computer graphics hardware to reduce the load on the CPU, and in many cases, speeds up graphics rendering. So taking WPF for what it is, it is actually a remarkable technology that, apparently, can read and assess what your machine's graphics capabilities are via the machine's video interface card. Moreover, WPF graphics uses a resolution-independent measurement in units to make applications more uniform and portable across devices. For instance, the size properties of elements in WPF are measured in resolution-independent pixels, where one pixel represents 1/96 of an inch--but this depends on the computer's DPI (dots per inch) setting. The graphics engine determines the correct pixel count so that all users see elements of the same size on all devices. To emphasize the importance of graphics sketching, I also introduce the Microsoft Blend SDK version 4.

Graphic elements are rendered on screen using a vector-based system in which calculations determine how to size and scale each element in order to prevent an oversized element against a regular-size foreground. The basic 2-D shapes are Lines, Rectangles, and Ellipses. WPF, as we all know, has controls that can be used to create custom shapes or curves. Brushes can be used to fill an element with solid colors, complex patterns, images, and even videos.

Tell Me What XAML is

In Windows Presentation Foundation, the screens are built with a dialect of XML called Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML). XML is data centric and is viewed as a technology in its own right. Data on certain web pages or a Web Service request (response message) is in the form of an XML document. Any data (any alphanumeric character) is tagged, as the rules for XML are very strict. That is, controls, images, or any item that is marked up on a page via HTML comprises the presentation content. Alphabetic letters or numbers are separately tagged via XML. The idea is to separate the presentation content on a web page from the data. This outputs a more dazzling-looking page. XAML is more declarative than imperative.

Read more: Codeproject

Posted via email from .NET Info