A WPF Application - Introduction

In this tutorial, our primary focus will be on using WPF to create applications. As you may know, .NET can be executed on all platforms which have a .NET implementation, but the most common platform is still Microsoft Windows. When we talk about Windows applications in this tutorial, it really just means an application that runs on Windows (or another .NET compatible platform) and not in a browser or remotely over the Internet.

A WPF application requires the .NET framework to run, just like any other .NET application type. Fortunately, Microsoft has been including the .NET framework on all versions of Windows since Vista, and they have been pushing out the framework on older versions through Windows Update. In other words, you can be pretty sure that most Windows users out there will be able to run your WPF application.

In the following chapters we will have a look at the structure and various aspects of a WPF application.