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Animation allows you to create truly user interfaces. It’s often used to apply effects—for example, icons that grow when you move over them, logos that spin, text that scrolls into view, and so on. Sometimes, these effects seem like excessive glitz. But used properly, animations can enhance an application in a number of ways. They can make an application seem more responsive, natural, and intuitive. (For example, a button that slides in when you click it feels like a real, physical button—not just another gray rectangle.) Animations can also draw attention to important elements and guide the user through transitions to new content. (For example, an application could advertise newly downloaded content with a twinkling, blinking, or pulsing icon in the status bar.)

In this chapter, you’ll tackle two more areas of WPF functionality: audio and video.

The support WPF provides for audio is a significant step up from previous versions of.NET, but it’s far from groundbreaking. WPF gives you the ability to play a wide variety of sound formats, including MP3 files and anything else supported by Windows Media Player. However, WPF doesn’t include advanced APIs for analyzing sound information, which is possible with DirectX. (For example, there’s no way to retrieve spectrum data that tells you the highs and lows of sound, which is useful for creating some types of synchronized effects and sound-driven animations.)

Developers have used DirectX and OpenGL to build three-dimensional interfaces for many years. However, the difficult programming model and the substantial video card requirements have kept 3-D programming out of most mainstream consumer applications and business software.

In previous Windows development frameworks, custom controls played a central role. But in WPF, the emphasis has shifted. Custom controls are still a useful way to build custom widgets that you can share between applications, but they’re no longer a requirement when you want to enhance and customize core controls. (To understand how remarkable this change is, it helps to point out that this book’s predecessor, , had nine complete chapters about custom controls and additional examples in other chapters. But in this book, you’ve made it to Chapter 24 without a single custom control sighting!)

In an ideal world, once developers master a new technology such as WPF they’d leave the previous framework behind. Everything would be written using the latest, most capable toolkit, and no one would ever worry about legacy code. Of course, this ideal world is nothing like the real world, and there are two reasons why most WPF developers will need to interact with the Windows Forms platform at some point: to leverage existing code investments and to compensate for missing features in WPF.

Sooner or later, you’ll want to unleash your WPF applications on the world. Although you can use dozens of different ways to transfer an application from your development computer to an end user’s desktop, most WPF applications use one of the following deployment strategies: