What is WPF ?

Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF, as we will refer to it throughout this book) is a completely new presentation framework, integrating the capabilities of those frameworks that preceded it, including User, GDI, GDI+, and HTML, and heavily influenced by toolkits targeted at the Web, such as Macro media Flash, and popular Windows applications such as Microsoft Word.

WPF exists as a subset of .NET Framework types that are for the most part located in the System.Windows namespace. If you have previously built applications with .NET Framework using managed technologies like ASP.NET and Windows Forms, the fundamental WPF programming experience should be familiar; you instantiate classes, set properties, call methods, and handle events, all using your favorite .NET Framework programming language, such as C# or Visual Basic.

To support some of the more powerful WPF capabilities and to simplify the programming experience, WPF includes additional programming constructs that enhance properties and events: dependency properties and routed events. For more information on dependency properties, see Dependency Properties Overview. For more information on routed events, see Routed Events Overview.