I have been reading up a bit now on Windows Presentation Foundation (Formerly Avalon). It is very difficult to know where to start, there are numerous articles sprinkled around the web, but it is not easy finding some kind of coherant learning experience.

From what I have found so far, it seems that there are 3 main selling points for WPF

1. It frees up the CPU and effectively passes graphical responsibility to the Graphics card. This advantage of course only pays off if you have a good graphics card. I have yet to find out if there are any minimum specification of card or if there is a switch at which point the graphics card is ignored and the CPU has to handle the graphics.

2. It will provide the richness of Windows Forms development within a browser windows, bringing with it all of the benefits associated with applications presented withing a browser window. However, this will mean that the host PC will require a Windows OS and browser to support it. So to reap the benefits of WPF all of your clients will require the WINFX runtime.

3. The GUI design of the application can be split out from the business code. I am unsure how much of an advantage this really is. In WPF, you can define your GUI in XAML (A specification over XML) and this is compiled somehow into the application. I remember learning about .NET Remoting and how you could contain all of the configuration information in an XML config file if you hosted the service in IIS. I am unsure if the benefits that this approach gave .NET remoting are the same as what XAML gives the WPF. Of course WPF GUI definition does not require XAML, it can be programatically defined via any .NET language (C#, VB.NET etc).


Whilst writing this, it was just reported on the news that the UK womens Curling team have been knocked out of the competition. Ho hum, 1 silver it is then.