Introduction

WPF has a very impressive graphic stack. That's one of the obvious selling points of the technology, as it's very visual and immediately recognizable. WPF's graphic capabilities range from simple 2D to arbitrarily complex 3D, with the typical integration we come to expect from WPF; everything can be interacted with anything – a 3D scene can be animating inside a button and that button still behaves like a button.

WPF also provides a powerful, declarative, animation engine. This makes using animations easy, removing the need to use timers, do refresh updates, and other low level tasks that are typical with other graphic frameworks.

This chapter explores some of WPF's graphic and animation capabilities. Missing from the chapter is discussion of WPF's 3D graphic support; this is simply beyond the scope of this book, as it must maintain a reasonable number of pages. 3D is a complex topic in itself; WPF makes using 3D relatively easy. Other sources have discussions on 3D in general...