It??™s also the most radical change to hit Windows
user interfaces since Windows 95.
In this chapter you??™ll peer into the architecture of WPF. You??™ll get your first look at how it
works, and you??™ll see what it promises for the next generation of Windows applications.
Understanding Windows Graphics
It??™s hard to appreciate how dramatic WPF is without realizing that Windows developers have
been using essentially the same display technology for more than 15 years. A standard
Windows application relies on two well-worn parts of the Windows operating system to create
its user interface:
??? User32 provides the familiar Windows look and feel for elements such as windows, buttons,
text boxes, and so on.
??? GDI/GDI+ provides drawing support for rendering shapes, text, and images at the cost
of additional complexity (and often lackluster performance).
Over the years, both technologies have been refined, and the APIs that developers use to
interact with them have changed dramatically. But whether you??™re crafting an application with
.NET and Windows Forms, or lingering in the past with Visual Basic 6 or MFC-based C++ code,
behind the scenes the same parts of the Windows operating system are at work. Newer frameworks
simply deliver better wrappers for interacting with User32 and GDI/GDI+.
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