Tag Archives: architecture

WPF internals part 2 : how the WPF controls are organized ?

A couple of weeks ago, I started a series of articles about WPF internals organization. In the first article I did a tour of the core WPF classes. In this second part, I’m reviewing the organization of the various controls that exist in the framework.

Because the image of the diagram is pretty big, I decided to use Silverlight DeepZoom and the result is just below this text 🙂 You can download the full image resolution here. Please use the full screen button in the upper right corner of the viewer for the best browsing experience.

    Here are general remarks that might help you get information from those diagrams.

    The top level Control class:

    • Defines general UI properties such as Background, Foreground, BorderBrush and BorderThickness
    • Defines a set of properties to control font rendering: FontFamily, FontSize, FontStyle…
    • Has a DoubleClick event (other mouse events such as MouseUp/MouseDown comes from the UIElement class)

    Below the Control class, we have (this list is not complete):

    Below the ContentControl class we can find many existing WPF controls:

    General other remarks:

    • It’s funny to see that both Window and UserControl inherits from ContentControl. Before doing the diagram I though that Window came from somewhere else 🙂
    • Having those diagrams in mind (or on a screen !) is very useful when you need to create your own custom control
    • We can see the differences between creating a custom control (inherit from Control or derived class) and a UserControl (inherit from UserControl)
    • .Net4 will introduce new controls (not in this diagram) in the WPF framework such: DataGrid, Calendar, TimePicker

    kick it on DotNetKicks.com

    PDC09 : How VS2010 was built with WPF ?

    PDC09

    In my last blog post, I did a review of a PDC09 Session “Advanced performance tuning with WPF”. Today, I’m doing a review for another very interesting session “How VS2010 was built with WPF ?”. The video is available here.

    vs2008tovs2010

    Why did Microsoft choose WPF for VS2010 ?

    • Technological: prove the capabilities of WPF4
    • Architectural
      • Separated presentation
      • Support for long range road map (+10 years)
    • Key VS2010 features need it: Editor, Architecture Editor, Parallel tools debugging
    • Take an opportunity to give feedback for WPF4: when VS2010 development started, .Net 3.5 SP1 was just shipped and it was the right time to give feedback for the new features and fixes for WPF4.

    It is worth noting that VS2010 is a project that is being watched carefully inside Microsoft. We can expect that more Microsoft applications will move to WPF in the next coming years.

    What WPF features are used ?

    • Declarative UI using XAML
    • Databinding
    • Styles and templates
    • Application Resources
    • Interop Win32 (because they did not have the time to rewrite everything using WPF or because features doest not need to use WPF for example de WinForms designer…)
    • Integration with the message loop (to deal with particular focus issues)
    • New text stack (part of WPF4) based on DirectWrite

    Staged approach

    • Define data models: a huge diagramming and architectural exercice
    • Replace the main window with WPF (only the window not its content !) to start the mix approach (managed/unmanaged, WPF/Hwnds)
    • Write new managed components: Window manager, command bar presentation
    • Scout with other VS teams
    • Test, Test, Test…

    What were the challenges ?

    • Mixed mode application: native and managed code; WPF and HWNDs (Win32 or WinForms)
    • Keep existing extensions working and allow new extensions to take advantage of WPF
    • Don’t “stop the train” other teams were working at the same time on the product to add new functionalities
    • Text clarity
    • Performance
    • Focus management

    You can watch the session here if you want more detail and demos of what I mention in this post.

    French article about MVVM posted !

    It’s finally online after a long work.I hope my french readers will enjoy it:  http://japf.developpez.com/tutoriels/dotnet/mvvm-pour-des-applications-wpf-bien-architecturees-et-testables/

    Here is the abstract translated to english:

    “Inch by inch, the WPF technology is being adopted by .Net developers as a development platform for next generation user interfaces. This changeover is taking time and complicated because WPF changes principles that are well known until now in the process of designing a user interface. The Model-View-ViewModel methodology helps formalize WPF developement by giving guidance that leads to apps cleary architectured, testable, and by optimizing the workflow between developer and designer.”