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Saturday, March 8, 2008

Summer Heralds Improvements to WPF (YEAH FINALLY!)

By Don Burnett
New Setup.exe Brings Improved .NET Setup for Applications

Later this year, Microsoft is going to ship a new setup framework for .NET that makes it easier to build optimized setup programs for windows applications. This setup framework can be integrated with existing installation products (like InstallShield) and others. Offering a better setup user experience., and enables a smaller and faster end-user setup experience of the .NET Framework.

Windows Forms and WPF client applications will be able to use this new setup to cleanly “bootstrap” getting the .NET Framework installed onto machines. Improvements will also be made to "cold start" times for applications

WPF Performance Improvements

Later this year, Microsoft is planning to release an update to WPF that includes a number of performance optimizations that improve its text, graphics, media and databinding support. These include:

- Acclerated Graphics Support. Moving the DropShadow and Blur bitmap effects, to be hardware accelerated (making them many times faster). The APIs for these effects will stay the same, no recompile necessary.

- Faster text rendering, especially when used in Visual and DrawingBrush. The APIs for these will also stay the same. No recoding or recompiling.

- Media and video performance will be much faster again no coding changes.

- A new WriteableBitmap API  will be introduced, that enables real-time bitmap updates from a software surface, and a new effects API.

- Microsoft will introduce new data scalability improvements for data editing. These include data virtualization support and container recycling, making it easier to build rich visualization controls.

WPF Control Improvements

With this update, Microsoft is planning to release a number of new controls for WPF.  Included in the list we are working on are DataGrid, Ribbon, and Calendar/DatePicker controls. Bringing more parity with Silverlight 2.0 and requested improvements for speed to existing controls.

VS 2008 WPF Designer Improvements

Microsoft is planning a service release of VS 2008 that includes a number of feature additions to its WPF designer support. These include event tab support within the property grid for control events, toolbox support within source mode, and a variety of other common asks and improvements.

The improvements should make it easier to build great wpf apps. In most cases these will not require any code changes.

 

3 comments:

hYam said...

Is new WriteableBitmap different from InteropBitmap ? I hope WPF supports "Imaging.CreateBitmapSourceFromDirect3DSurface", like Imaging.CreateBitmapSourceFromMemorySection.

hYam said...

Is new WriteableBitmap different from InteropBitmap ? I hope WPF supports "Imaging.CreateBitmapSourceFromDirect3DSurface", like Imaging.CreateBitmapSourceFromMemorySection.

Don Burnett said...

As I understand the direction they are going with this, InteropBitmap it is meant to be an additional option that can be used in place of WriteableBitmap from the original 3.0.

It's supposed to do a number of things like enabling paint programs, webcams, and it's synced with changes to the UI..

I know they also mentioned support for WIC but I haven't heard publicly the extent of imaging support..

I also heard that milcore is no longer around and has been replaced.

Keep checking Scott Gutherie's blog and the WPF TEAM BLOGGGERS I am sure all will be revealed soon enough.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

http://wpf.netfx3.com/blogs/presentation_bloggers/archive/tags/blog/default.aspx