A new graphics experience from Microsoft
2007 will go into the history books as the year of 'The Return of Rich
UI'. There are so many new technologies for implementing compelling UI.
Flash, Flex, Silverlight and WPF are just a few that come to mind.
WPF Wonderland is intended to be a place to find WPF/Silverlight resources.
What is WPF?
WPF represents the first significant change to the Windows graphics engine
in over ten years. What is trivial to build with WPF is difficult or impossible
in Microsoft's current Winforms technology. The WPF API is chock full of improvements
for constructing rich client applications. WPF is hardware accelerated, using the
graphics rendering engine in your GPU for faster processing of UI primitives. It
is vector based, via Direct3D, which provides truly scalable and resolution independent UIs. WPF makes it easy to integrate video, audio, text, animation and 2D-3D graphics
into a seamless montage. You may not need 3D in your business application but I
bet you have UI ideas that are difficult to accomplish with the current set of graphics
tools - like GDI. If you truly care about creating a great user interface, you owe
it to yourself to see what WPF can do.
Read more at Microsoft's WPF site.
What is Silverlight?
Internet applications have enormous appeal for many companies, especially
startups. The last couple years have seen phenomenal growth in tools to build
web application with more interactive UI. A new acronym was coined recently to help
clarify this emerging UI development world - RIA (Rich Internet Applications)
.
From Wikipedia - link
Rich Internet applications (RIA) are Web applications that have the features and
functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing
necessary for the user interface to the Web client but keep the bulk of the data
(i.e., maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application
server. RIAs typically: run in a Web browser, or do not require software installation
run locally in a secure environment called a sandbox
Silverlight is Microsoft's latest entry in the RIA world. Silverlight is similar
to Flash, you have to install a small runtime on your computer and a plug-in for
your browser. Even though it is a brand new product Silverlight has an impressive start.
It runs in most browsers: IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera and Safari.
Microsoft is creating a runtime for Windows and Macintosh. The open source
community is supplying a runtime for Linux
Silverlight can be programmed in JavaScript, VB, C# Ruby and Python. Silverlight
pages are deployed as HTML, ASP.NET or AJAX pages. They use a subset of WPF
XAML and have excellent video support.
Read more at Microsoft's Silverlight site.