Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

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CHAPTER 8 ■ .NET 3.0: WINDOWS PRESENTATION FOUNDATION
Hello, Web.Next Readers!
WPF parses this document and uses the elements that are defined within it to implement
and render the UI. You can see the results of this in Figure 8-1.
Figure 8-1. Rendering the XAML button
As WPF provides a vector-based rendering system, the application can be resized,
and the button will be resized along with it without losing fidelity. Figure 8-2 shows the
same application window where the user has resized it to make it much larger.
Figure 8-2. Resizing the button window
As you can see, the button resized and fit itself according to the dimensions of the
window. This approach provides a number of distinct advantages over the previous
form/control methodologies for defining and running UIs:
It allows for the separation of UI definition and application logic. Designers can use
tools such as Expression Blend (which you will see later in this chapter) to define the
UI look and feel, as well as how interactions take place within the UI. Design output
is expressed in XAML, which is then taken up by developers to implement the application
logic. Prior to XAML, there was a huge impedance mismatch between