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One of the really great enhancements in ASP.NET was the introduction of master pages. They help developers to create a consistent layout for the pages in an application. Unfortunatly there is no such concept in WPF. But there is an easy way to build a control similar to an ASP.NET master page.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a great technology for creating compelling user interfaces, but that doesn't mean you don't have to take the responsiveness of your application into account. The simple fact is, no matter what type of long-running processes are involved—whether getting large results from a database, making asynchronous Web service calls, or any number of other potentially intensive operations—making your application more responsive is guaranteed to make your users much happier in the long run. But before you can start using an asynchronous programming model in your WPF application, it is important that you understand the WPF threading model. In this article I will not only introduce you to that threading model, but I'll also show you how the Dispatcher-based objects work and explain how to use the BackgroundWorker so that you can create compelling and responsive user interfaces...

Outline font technologies such as TrueType primarily provide us with typographical flexibility and accuracy, but they can also serve as graphical playthings. Programmers can get access to the actual outlines that define each text character and treat them as vector graphics objects. The outlines can be stroked, filled, used for clipping, or subjected to transforms. A popular feature in Microsoft Word known as WordArt is based on this concept.

It's important to recognize the nature and limitations of these character outlines: they are strictly geometrical and are missing the "hints" that the operating system normally uses to render fonts on the screen. These hints allow the characters to be rasterized intelligently based on the available pixel grid. Consequently, the unhinted character outlines look best in big font sizes or on high-resolution devices. They are usually not adequate for rendering text at normal font sizes on the screen. (However, as printer resolution gets higher and as antialiasing is used more for screen graphics, the value of hinting has decreased)..

This article examines how to design and create dynamic user interfaces using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Along the way we will explore a demo application which uses XAML for creating a dynamic user interface to display rich and interactive alert messages to the user.

A WPF library to easily integrate Windows docking features in applications like Visual Studio

At a minimum, a Mobile PC application is expected to efficiently manage the power needs, communication environment, inking and form factor constraints of the platforms it supports. This article shows how to easily incorporate ink awareness, power awareness, power awareness and size awareness into otherwise Mobile PC agnostic Windows Form applications, bringing then much closer to conformity as Mobile PC applications. The Mobile PC agnostic Windows Form application used for this demonstration is the VB.NET version of the Black Jack Card Game Starter Kit sample application with either Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2005 as the development environment. The idea is to combine several distinct classes that manage screen size, ink, power and network connectivity separately into one Windows Form class that is easily inherited by a Mobile PC agnostic application. This article highlights some of the benefits of this approach.

A simple application that is optimized for varying screen sizes and includes power/network status.

You've probably heard about Avalon (now Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF), and maybe seen screenshots or a demo, but now you can try it out yourself. Get started building next-generation Windows applications now.