Summary: This article explains the need for a new platform to exploit the graphics power of today’s computer systems. This provides background information on the evolution of WPF and covers why user experience is an important consideration in application design. WPF is an integrated client platform and next generation of development tools for building Windows client applications.
The Evolution of WPF: The evolution of WPF begins with the Internet Explorer and DHTML model. This model can produce sophisticated content but has scalability, content, and media limitations.
Elaboration:
The four key ingridients of WPF:
Managed Code: As Managed code would be the focus of future development, WPF was built using Managed Code.
Markup Language: XAML known as Extensible Application Markup Language provides great level of parallelism between the markup language and the .Net Framework.
Code Base: The Windows Presentation Manager platform was built from the ground up to provide a managed interface for Windows development. The platform is built upon an unmanaged layer called the Media Integration Layer (MIL) that provides support for both device-independent and vector graphics by using the underlying services of DirectX. The developer API, however, is exposed entirely as managed code.
Platform Support: WPF was designed for Windows Vista. Windows Vista provides new WPF-enabled drivers that take better advantage of WPF, hence providing a richer user experience with higher quality graphics and smoother animations. Although WPF applications run on Windows XP, they do not look as visually compelling as on Windows Vista.
The Importance of User Experience:
User Experience is comprised of more than how an application looks. It represents the overall interaction process of the user with an application. This interaction provides the user with added value, and it also provides tremendous business value in the following ways:
- It Creates brand awareness, enables the user to differentiate products, and increase customer satisfaction
- Helps the user to work with products in an easy, consistent, and secure manner
- Encourages the user to use your product
Traditionally, functionality has been more important than user experience in software development, at least partly because the available technologies did not always make it easy to create compelling user interfaces (UI). Microsoft Windows brought a consistent look and feel to applications that made it easier to transition from one application to another by using similar interface components such as menus and toolbars.
The introduction of WPF now enables the seamless convergence of user interface, media, and documents, allowing you to create applications with a compelling user experience with a minimum of work.
Presentation: The presentation of your user interface is extremely important and contributes greatly to user experience. Software applications should provide the following:
- Appropriate features for the program and its target users.
- Aesthetic appearance.
- High-quality usability and flow.
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