News
New WPF Reference App Displays 'Juicy' Capabilities
- By Chris Kanaracus
- September 19, 2007
Component vendor Infragistics has released a reference application and guidance for Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the UI development subsystem in .NET Framework 3.0.
The app -- dubbed "Tangerine" -- is a searchable product catalog for an online bookseller. It pulls data through Amazon.com's E-Commerce Service and presents it through an interface designed with Infragistics' NetAdvantage for WPF control set.
Infragistics' Ed Blankenship, lead developer on the Tangerine project, provided a demo for Redmond Developer News. The app showcases capabilities such as advanced databinding and carousel-style views of product information. Blankenship and his coprogrammers also used the company's datagrid control to provide more traditional views, as WPF does not ship with a datagrid.
While the .NET Framework 3.0 shipped last year, tooling and guidance to exploit its capabilities are only arriving now, Blankenship noted.
"Early on, we noticed there wasn't a lot of guidance on WPF because no one was really doing WPF," he said. To this end, Infragistics has released the source code for Tangerine as well as some related white papers. They are available here.
Tangerine displayed smooth performance, but enterprises faced with an installed base of older client machines probably won't be able to fully mimic the results just yet. For example, WPF applications running on Vista machines use hardware acceleration, but not those on XP. "At times, it's a different experience, that's for sure," Blankenship acknowledged.
Blankenship said it would take about one month for a developer working full time with WPF to craft an app like Tangerine, along with "a week or two to figure out the architecture."