Although these extensions made it possible to create
and develop WPF applications in Visual Studio 2005, they didn??™t provide a drag-and-drop
designer for WPF windows.
The .NET Framework 3.5 was released in conjunction with Visual Studio 2008, and as a
result, it offers much better design-time support for building WPF applications. This book
assumes you are using WPF 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. However, if you??™re using WPF 3.0,
virtually all of the same concepts apply.
New Features in WPF 3.5
If you??™ve programmed with the first version of WPF, you might be interested in tracking down
the changes. Aside from bug fixes, performance tune-ups, and better design support, WPF 3.5
introduces the following enhancements (listed in order of their appearance in this book):
??? Firefox support for XBAPs. It??™s now possible to run WPF browser-hosted applications
(known as XBAPs) in Firefox as well as in Internet Explorer. Chapter 9 has more.
??? Data binding support for LINQ. LINQ is a set of language extensions that allow developers
to write queries. These queries can pull data out of various data sources, including
in-memory collections, XML files, and databases, all without requiring a line of low-level
code. (To learn more about LINQ, you can refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/
data/ref/linq or a dedicated book on the subject.
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