News
New WPF Reference App Displays 'Juicy' Capabilities
Component vendor Infragistics has released a reference application and guidance
for Windows Presentation Foundation, the UI development subsystem in .NET Framework
3.0.
The app -- dubbed "Tangerine" -- is a searchable product catalog
for an online bookseller. It pulls data through Amazon.com's E-Commerce service
and presents it through an interface designed with Infragistics' NetAdvantage
for WPF control set.
Infragistics' Ed Blankenship, lead developer on the Tangerine project, provided
a demo for Redmond Developer News. The app showcases capabilities such as advanced
databinding and carousel-style views of product information. Blankenship and
his co-programmers also used the company's datagrid control to provide more
traditional views, as WPF does not ship with a datagrid.
While the .NET Framework 3.0 shipped last year, tooling and guidance to exploit
its capabilities is only arriving now, according to Blankenship. "Early
on, we noticed there wasn't a lot of guidance on WPF because no one was really
doing WPF," he said.
To this end, Infragistics has released the source code for Tangerine as well
as some related whitepapers. They are available here.
Tangerine displayed smooth performance, but enterprises faced with an installed
base of older client machines probably won't be able to fully mimic the results
just yet. For example, WPF applications running on Vista machines use hardware
acceleration, but not those on XP.
"At times, it's a different experience, that's for sure," Blankenship
said.
According to Blankenship, it would take about one month for a developer working
full-time with WPF to craft an app like Tangerine, along with "a week or
two to figure out the architecture."
About the Author
Chris Kanaracus is the news editor for Redmond Developer News.