wpf which features ?

Question

Hi all, I need to prepare a presentation about what's WPF, my audiences are mostly project managers and system analyzers . I intend to show them most important features of WPF like DataBinding . Can you suggest me a list of features which you think will be interesting for my audiences . and also does anybody know any website where I can find presentations about introducing WPF ? thanks

Answer 1

Have you surfed through MSDN? A good place to start: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms754130.aspx

Answer 2

Here's a question and its duplicate with compelling reasons to use WPF - these reasons can easily be mapped to the most important features since they represent the advantages of using WPF compared to other options (mainly WinForms).

Note: DataBinding is not one of the most important features of WPF in my opinion! you can easily do that with WinForms.

Answer 3

In my opinion the killer features for WPF are (in no particular order):

• Strict separation of UI layout, style and functionality
• Templates
• Styles
• Data Binding

The combination of those features enables really fun ways of crafting application UI. Such as this example of a list box with templates and data binding or a slightly different TreeView visualization. Especially the ItemsControl is way overrepresented which just demonstrates its versatility :-)

Answer 4

Other answers already mentioned the technical advantages. Since your target group consists of managers, you might want to throw in a few non-technical points:

WPF is the new "Microsoft standard" for developing rich client applications in .net.

• You won't need costly migration to another technology anytime soon and
• there's quite a large user base out there (for example, here on Stackoverflow), so your developers won't be "left alone" when facing technical problems.

WPF has useful features for designing user interfaces:

• It allows the user interface design to be separated from coding (UI designers can use Expression Blend).
• It's very easy to do eye candy that impresses customers during presentations of your products. (Yes, this is important for the sales people.)

(Well, the Visual Studio Designer support is not so great yet, but I've heard that this improves drastically in VS 2010.)

Answer 5

WPF supports XAML the declarative language which encourages a separation of front-end appearance and back-end logic.