Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By : Sheridan Yuen
Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By: Sheridan Yuen

Overview of this book

Windows Presentation Foundation is rich in possibilities when it comes to delivering an excellent user experience. This book will show you how to build professional-grade applications that look great and work smoothly. We start by providing you with a foundation of knowledge to improve your workflow – this includes teaching you how to build the base layer of the application, which will support all that comes after it. We’ll also cover the useful details of data binding. Next, we cover the user interface and show you how to get the most out of the built-in and custom WPF controls. The final section of the book demonstrates ways to polish your applications, from adding practical animations and data validation to improving application performance. The book ends with a tutorial on how to deploy your applications and outlines potential ways to apply your new-found knowledge so you can put it to use right away.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Leveraging the power of hardware rendering


As we've learnt, the visuals that WPF can output, while beautiful, can be very CPU intensive and we often need to bear this in mind when designing our Views. However, rather than compromising our designs, we can offload the intensive rendering processes to the host computer's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instead.

While WPF will default to utilize its software rendering pipeline, it is also able to take advantage of a hardware rendering pipeline. This hardware pipeline leverages features of Microsoft DirectX, as long as the host PC has DirectX version 7 or higher installed. Furthermore, if the version of DirectX that is installed is version 9 or higher, increased performance improvements will be seen.

The WPF Framework looks at the graphics hardware that is installed on the computer that it is running on and puts it into one of three categories, depending on its features, such as video RAM, shaders, and support for multi-textures. If it does not...