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The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is an entirely new graphical display system for Windows. WPF is designed for.NET, influenced by modern display technologies such as HTML and Flash, and is hardware-accelerated. It’s also the most radical change to hit Windows user interfaces since Windows 95.

XAML (short for Extensible Application Markup Language, and pronounced “zamniel”) is a markup language used to instantiate.NET objects. Although XAML is a technology that can be applied to many different problem domains, its primary role in life is to construct WPF user interfaces. In other words, XAML documents define the arrangement of panels, buttons, and controls that make up the windows in a WPF application.

While it’s running, every WPF application is represented by an instance of the System. Windows.Application class. This class tracks all the open windows in your application, decides when your application shuts down, and fires application events that you can handle to perform initialization and cleanup.

Half the battle in any user interface design is organizing the content in a way that’s attractive, practical, and flexible. But the real challenge is making sure that your layout can adapt itself gracefully to different window sizes.

In the previous chapter you explored the WPF layout system, which lets you arrange a window by placing elements into specialized layout containers. With this system, even a simple window breaks down to a nested series of Grid, StackPanel, and DockPanel containers. Dig deep enough and you’ll eventually find the visible elements (widgets such as buttons, labels, and text boxes) inside the various containers.

Every .NET programmer is familiar with properties and events, which are a core part of .NET’s object abstraction. Few would expect WPF, a user interface technology, to change either of these fundamentals. But surprisingly enough, that’s exactly what WPF does.

Now that you’ve learned the fundamentals of WPF layout, content, and event handling, you’re ready to take a closer look at the elements WPF includes. In this chapter, you’ll take a quick tour of the most fundamental WPF controls, including basic ingredients such as labels, buttons, and text boxes. Although Windows developers have been using these items for years, this chapter fills in a few important details about their WPF implementations. Along the way, you’ll also take a quick look at the System. Windows. Control class to learn how WPF controls use brushes and fonts.

Windows are the basic ingredients in any desktop application—so basic that the operating system is named after them. And although WPF has a model for creating navigation applications that divide tasks into separate pages, windows are still the dominant metaphor for creating applications.

Most traditional Windows applications are arranged around a window that contains toolbars and menus. The toolbars and menus the application—as the user clicks them, actions happen, and other windows appear. In document-based applications, there may be several equally important “main” windows that are open at once, but the overall model is the same. The user spends most of his time in one place, and jumps to separate windows when necessary.

Chapter 6, you learned about routed events, which you can use to respond to a wide range of mouse and keyboard actions. However, events are a fairly low-level ingredient. In a realistic application, functionality is divided into higher-level . These tasks may be triggered by a variety of different actions and through a variety of different user-interface elements, including main menus, context menus, keyboard shortcuts, and toolbars.