Before WPF, developers had to work with a rather alarming number of technologies and application programming interfaces (APIs).
But it won’t be just the Vista community that benefits from WPF because Microsoft has decided to backport WPF for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.ĭevelopers will (and, by all accounts, already do) love WPF because it provides a one-stop shop for all their graphical needs. Code-named Avalon but now officially called Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Vista’s graphical underpinnings should prove to be a boon to both developers and end users. The Windows Presentation FoundationĪll the interface changes that come in the Vista package are a direct or indirect result of Vista’s new graphical subsystem. Vista’s interface is almost certainly the best that Microsoft has come up with so far (some would claim that’s not saying much), and it’s got plenty of eye-popping and jaw-dropping features without descending into gaudiness and mere trickery. So how does Vista’s interface rate? As you’ll see in this chapter, the answer has to be "pretty darned good," although with a few reservations. If the interface to all these tasks is ugly, inefficient, or confusing, then we’ll simply get less work done or have less fun than we would otherwise. After all, we use the operating system’s interface for many nontrivial tasks during a typical day: starting programs saving our work finding documents moving, copying, and deleting files maintaining the computer troubleshooting problems networking with others and so much more. That’s all true, but the operating system interface shouldn’t be relegated to mere eye candy status. Don’t things such as stability and security mean more? Shouldn’t the goal of any OS be to just get out of the way and let us get on with our work, perhaps a tad more productively than before? What does it look like? Is it cool? Can I run it? On the surface this seems superficial because, after all, Windows is and should be more than just a pretty interface. Whenever Microsoft releases a new operating system, the one thing anyone seems to want to talk about is the new interface.