Developing WPF applications with Visual Studio

Article
01/24/2007

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft’s preferred technology for writing windows applications for Vista. You can write WPF applications with Visual Studio to run either under Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista. You can read about WPF in Charles Petzold's new book

Applications = Code + Markup (2006) (ISBN-10: 0735619573) For some reason, this book isn't listed in either the Barnes & Noble or the Borders Books database, but it's probably on their shelves.

Before you write your first WPF program using Visual Studio, you’ll want to download and install these three software packages:

.NET Framework 3.0 (codename WinFX).
Windows SDK for Vista.
VS 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (codename Fidalgo)

.NET Framework 3.0

.NET Framework 3.0 is the runtime for both WPF and Windows Connection Framework (WCF, codename Indigo). .NET Framework 3.0 ships with Windows Vista.

With .NET Framework 3.0 alone, you can write WPF programs using Visual Studio (or even NotePad). In Visual Studio, you won’t see project templates and Intellisense. But you can create an empty project and add references to PresentationCore.dll and other WPF assemblies. By the way, you won’t find them under the .NET tab – You’ll have to browse to the ReferencedAssemblies folder.

Once you’ve written and launched a WPF program, the PresentationHost will display the WPF application for you.

Windows SDK for Vista

Windows SDK for Vista adds documentation (large) and Intellisense for WPF . The documentation isn’t integrated into Visual Studio, and there are no project templates. However, there's an excellent set of samples for you to install.

The download page has two options hidden in the Instructions section. Use the Web Install option if you have a high-bandwidth. If you intend to write WPF applications using Visual C# and don’t care about programming against the older Win32 API then set the installation options this way:

When installation completes, you'll find the zipped sample files at
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0\Samples

VS 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0

VS 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 merges the documentation you obtained from the Windows SDK into Visual Studio and adds project templates. WPF assemblies show up in the .NET tab of the Add Reference dialog. This download also adds a XAML designer (codename Cider).