Why is the scalability of the UI important in WPF?

Question

While I love developing user interfaces in WPF and XAML, I've tried to embrace the scalability aspect by also creating my icons as vector images... but it's really hard! I very rarely get the same kind of crispness that I can with raster graphics and it almost always takes me longer to produce the icons.

Am I wasting my time? Is there no benefit to making scalable icons? Or is there a setting somewhere in Windows that scales the UI for accessibility, thus making scalabilty important?

Would welcome your advice. :)

Answer 1

There are some advantages to using vector/scalable graphics in WPF. Off the top of my head:

• You can build a high-fidelity UI that adapts to the user's DPI settings - see this blog post for more information
• You can scale the images in the UI (e.g. use a ViewBox to stretch the icon), allowing for "zoomable" interfaces
• The file size is greatly reduced, specially for larger images
• You don't have to juggle different image sizes and resolutions
• You can edit the images directly in Blend

One problem of this approach is that it might cause more stress to the CPU if the vector icons are not cached (To cache, set UIElement.CacheMode to a BitmapCache).

If you're 100% sure the icons will stay the same size, you can go with raster images safely - just do whatever you think is more productive in your case.