The Roadmap for WPF

Today, we announced the roadmap for the WPF platform. The post defines the areas of investment in future releases of WPF, and details the current progress of improvements made to the WPF platform in the .NET Framework 4.6 and Visual Studio 2015.

We have made some key improvements to WPF in this release:

• Transparent child windows
• Multi-image cursor files
• Re-designed Blend experience
• New set of Visual Diagnostics tools
• Timeline tool in the Performance and Diagnostics hub

We have also fixed a number of customer reported issues. The best place to ask us questions or engage with the us is in the comments of the roadmap for the WPF platform blog post.

Author: Harikrishna Menon, Program manager, Visual Studio Client Tools Team Hari is a Program Manager with Microsoft, and works on the Xaml Experiences Team in Visual Studio. He has been with Microsoft for over 6 years, and has shipped multiple versions of Visual Studio working on a variety of XAML tooling experiences spanning different XAML platforms like WPF, Windows Phone and  Windows Store.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2014
  Awesome, great news, so glad I never gave up on WPF!

• Anonymous
  November 13, 2014
  What abiut new DirectX versions support with immediate rendering mode?

• Anonymous
  November 16, 2014
  I actually already have transparent child                             PreViewWindow.AllowsTransparency = true;                             PreViewWindow.WindowStyle = System.Windows.WindowStyle.None; , 4.6 seems to have broke that, could you elaborate on your transparent child window and could you support the above in addition , right now DWM or something is hiding my way

• Anonymous
  November 18, 2014
  PreViewWindow.WindowStyle = System.Windows.WindowStyle.None; turn out to be the problem.   is Window.AllowsTransparency = true; alone the new way?

• Anonymous
  November 19, 2014
  Thank you Microsoft!

• Anonymous
  November 19, 2014
  @Dave: Here is a sample for the Transparent Child Window           IntPtr parentWindowHandle = new WindowInteropHelper(this).Handle;           HwndSourceParameters windowParams = new HwndSourceParameters("SemiTransparentChildWindow");           windowParams.ParentWindow = parentWindowHandle;           //int values of WS_CHLID, WS_CLIPCHILDREN, and WS_VISIBLE           int styleParams = 0x40000000 | 0x02000000 | 0x10000000;           windowParams.WindowStyle = styleParams;           windowParams.UsesPerPixelTransparency = true;           windowParams.PositionX = 100;           windowParams.PositionY = 100;           HwndSource hwndsSrc = new HwndSource(windowParams);           Ellipse ellipse = new Ellipse();           ellipse.Width = 100;           ellipse.Height = 100;           ellipse.Fill = Brushes.Green;           ellipse.Opacity = 0.1;           hwndsSrc.RootVisual = ellipse; Make sure you have an application manifest  file which has the following property on it for this to work. <compatibility xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1">   <application>     <supportedOS Id="{4a2f28e3-53b9-4441-ba9c-d69d4a4a6e38}"/>   </application> </compatibility>

• Anonymous
  November 19, 2014
  @Black_Joker: SCBP like support is pretty interesting and we are investigating that, but our primary focus is making WPF work better with newer versions of DX.

• Anonymous
  November 19, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 19, 2014
  Great news, thanks!

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2014
  thanks for the info on the transparent windows @hari, I wasn't aware there was an issue with transparent WPF windows Ive always used window = new MainWindow(); window.AllowsTransparency = true; window.WindowStyle = System.Windows.WindowStyle.None; window.ClipToBounds = false; window.content  = new canvas,grid etc window.Show(); isn't what your showing a transparent Win32 Window? , or am I missing something.

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2014
  @Dave: Previously transparent windows were not supported for Child Windows and instead only worked for Top level windows as in you example. We have added support for child windows in this release and It will work on Windows 8+ OS'es as described in the application manifest.  

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2014
  I'm calling my example from a open WPF windows and creating a child window, is that not a child window? , it is always in the foreground,                              PreViewWindow.WindowStyle = System.Windows.WindowStyle.None;                              IntPtr hWnd = new System.Windows.Interop.WindowInteropHelper(window).Handle;                              int styleParams = 0x40000000 | 0x02000000 | 0x10000000;                              int GWL_STYLE = -16;                              SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_STYLE, styleParams); this took care of the PreViewWindow.WindowStyle = System.Windows.WindowStyle.None problem, which which is required after the                         SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_STYLE, styleParams); otherwise window.AllowsTransparency = true; throws and exception saying it requires System.Windows.WindowStyle.None. so I wont need an different .Net versions. that said can the that implementation support not requiring window being in foreground? I will keep looking but I cant find a way to put WPF in hwnd. thanks again @hari

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2014
  I'll test against win10 later, I was wondering if why the new transparent windows require 8+?

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2014
  Good to see WPF getting loved (again) ;-)

• Anonymous
  November 25, 2014
  Thx! Glad to see new post after 3 years of silence )

• Anonymous
  November 25, 2014
  Do you see any future release to also include Microsoft Office themes?

• Anonymous
  December 08, 2014
  is there an update/roadmap like the one given by the .net core team   blogs.msdn.com/.../introducing-net-core.aspx on its way from the .net framework team?  

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2014
  I reviewed the uservoice, I see a lot good ideas, most of which have pretty easy work arounds, the only concern I would have to putting to much weight on the number of votes, some of the better ideas have few votes, the other thing is that there is only one issue marked under consideration, maybe you could mark some others as " under consideration" , the problem I see is when you filter by "under consideration" you lose the "WPF" filter, you may want to let whoever is in charge that poor functionality on your own websites don't instill much confidence, It's a little hard to take your managed web hosting seriously when your own sites don't function properly.

• Anonymous
  December 17, 2014
  Guess I am just impatient, but its been a month since the last update.  Any words of encouragement for the holidays?  Anything to update as a result of the feedback over the last month?  Maybe one more blog post in the WPF section before the end of the year as a gift for us all?  

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2014
  @pmont: We hope to put out a couple of blogs in January :)

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2014
  Do you have a vertical support, such as Japanese?

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2014
  Is there any hope that the WPF Toolkit gets a little bit of love?  Yes there is a version on GIT and the Extended WPF Toolkit, but it was a nice venue for MS to be able to release controls outside of the normal .net cycle.  It would be nice to bring it back to life.