Darren is conducting some Vista training around Australia, and in preparation is doing a serise of posts over at TechTalkBlogs to whip the salavating masses* into a Vista frenzy. One of my favourite features in Vista is (not surprisingly) WPF, and recently this missive from Darren on that very topic caught my eye. On the whole I couldn’t agree more - Microsoft’s marketing and evangelism of WPF has focused on the “oooh, shiny“ factor far too much, at the expense of features people will actually use every day like data binding, simple styling and the great text editing and display capabilities of WPF. Some of the sample applications like “The North Face Demo“ have further compounded this - the North Face is amazing, but just not something your typical corporate developer can relate to.
Something that not many people know (and which I hope Darren has time to drill into on his Vista road-show) is the fact that although WPF has been back-ported to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 WPF will run better Vista than on either of these two other platforms (assuming you have reasonable graphics hardware with WDDM drivers). This is because of the new video driver model in Vista which virtualizes video memory and GPU and will allow multiple WPF apps to co-exist better than they do on XP/2003. I know Darren would love to talk over the really nitty gritty details of this (and all the other advancements in Vista) with anyone who cares to ask so don’t be bashful. There’s no level of technical detail he won’t drill down to.
* That would be you and I