On the other hand, if you have a considerable
investment in a Windows Forms??“based business application, there??™s no need to recode your
application for WPF. The Windows Forms platform will continue to be supported for years
to come.
Perhaps the best part of the story is the fact that Microsoft has invested considerable
effort in building an interoperability layer between WPF and Windows Forms (which plays a
similar role to the interoperability layer that allows .NET applications to continue to use
legacy COM components). In Chapter 25, you??™ll learn how to use this support to host Windows
Forms controls inside a WPF application, and vice versa. WPF offers similarly robust support
for integrating with older Win32-style applications.
CHAPTER 1 n INTRODUCING WPF 14
DirectX Also Lives On
There??™s one area where WPF isn??™t a good fit: when creating applications with demanding realtime
graphics, such as complex physics-based simulators or cutting-edge action games. If you
want the best possible video performance for these types of applications, you??™ll need to program
at a much lower level and use raw DirectX. You can download the managed .NET
libraries for DirectX programming at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx.
Silverlight
Like the .NET Framework itself, WPF is a Windows-centric technology.
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