The Importance of User Experience in WPF Tuesday, Dec 23 2008

User Experience: User experience is more than looks. User experience represents the overall interaction process of the user with a product. The interaction provides the user with added value and it also provides tremendous business value by:

• Creating brand awareness.
  
• Enabling the user to differentiate products, and increase customer satisfaction.
  
• Helping the user to work with products in an easy, consistent and secure manner.
  
• Encouraging the user to use your product and others like it.
  

Traditionally, functionality has been more important than user experience in software development, at least partly because the available technologies did not always make it easy to create compelling user interfaces (UI). The introduction of WPF now enables the seamless convergence of user interface, media, and documents, and means that you can create applications with a compelling user experience with a minimum of work.

Presentation:

• Appropriate features for the program and its target users.
  
• Aesthetic appearance, often in a subtle way.
  
• High-quality usability and flow.
  
• Durable good impression.
  

Professional Design: Along with the developer, professional designers have an important role to play in user experience. The role of the designer is to create an interface that is useful, usable, desirable, and feasible. WPF provides features such as XAML that greatly improve the collaboration possibilities between the designer and the developer of an application.

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The Evolution of WPF Tuesday, Dec 23 2008

The evolution of WPF begins with the Internet Explorer and dynamic HTML model. This model can produce sophisticated content but has scalability, content, and media limitations. Microsoft also saw a need for a new platform that could exploit the significant graphical power of modern computers. At the start of 2001, Microsoft established a new project to build an integrated Web client platform. The project team made four crucial decisions:

Managed or Unmanaged Code: At the start of the project, the first version of the .Net Framework had not shipped. However, because it was clear to Microsoft that managed code would be the focus of future development, the team decided to use managed code to build the platform.

Markup Language: The choices available to Microsoft were either to invent a new markup language or build one that used Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. The project team wanted parallelism between the markup language and the .Net Framework and decided to create a new markup language, known as Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML).

Code Base: The Windows Presentation Manager Platform was built from the ground up to provide a managed interface for Windows development. The platform is built upon an unmanaged layer called the Media Integration Layer (MIL) that provides support for both device-independent and vector graphics by using the underlying services of DirectX. The developer API, however, is exposed entirely as managed code.

Platform Support: Although supported on Windows XP SP2, WPF was designed for Windows Vista. Windows Vista provides new WPF-enabled drivers that take better advantage of WPF, providing a richer experience with higher fidelity graphics and smoother animations. Although WPF applications run on Windows XP, they do not look as visually compelling as on Windows Vista.

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