Presentation Foundation Moves Beyond Windows

A cross-platform version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), known as WPF/E (for “Everywhere”), will support the Visual Basic (VB) and C# programming languages and enable developers to build stand-alone as well as browser-based applications. This significant change in plans (since WPF/E was announced in Sept. 2005) could increase the appeal of WPF/E to traditional corporate developers, make it easier for Microsoft to support WPF/E with tools such as Visual Studio, and help the company fend off Adobe, which is trying to move into the corporate development market with Flash and Flex.

Move to .NET Highlights New Plan

WPF is a new graphics engine and API built on the .NET Framework that will be included in Windows Vista and will ship as an add-on to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. WPF gives developers a platform for building applications that offer sophisticated graphics, including multimedia, animation, video, and text.

At the heart of WPF is XAML (rhymes with “camel”), an XML format for describing the user interface (UI) of an application. XAML allows programmers to create XML descriptions of graphics and UI elements, including 2D and 3D graphics and video clips as well as traditional UI elements, such as buttons and list boxes. Building sophisticated UIs often requires programmers and graphic artists to collaborate, and Microsoft hopes XAML will make it easier for artists to design a UI and then hand off the XAML to a programmer to add the appropriate code.