Applicatons = Markup + Code

I was asked by one of Chinese leading ComSci book publishers to write a book review on Charles Petzold's classical WPF book Applications = Markup + Code, because they've just finished with translating this awesome book into Chinese. Charles is always one of my most respectable .NET gurus, and here is my humble attempt at commentting on his book:

Windows Presentation Foundation hits the Windows programming community quite tremendously from the very beginning of its CTP release not only because it's a much better and superior technology than the stale GDI/USER based UI Framework, but also because it brings in a new programming paradigm that most Windows programmers might have never thought of, that is Applications = Markup + Code.

Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsoft's first attempt at unifying the programming model both for Windows desktop and the Web going forward (with the introduction of Silverlight, you can employ the same programming concept and techniques to author Rich Internet Applications). Windows Presentation Foundation also enables a new workflow between developers and designers, with Windows Presentation Foundation, designers has become an integral part of the whole software development process, and they will have a vital say over the final appearance of the whole UI, because they are trained for this, and specialized at doing this. This can free the developers from concerning about something they are not good at, such as how to adjust the colour contrast to make the Button looks more esthetically pleasing.

Windows Presentation Foundation also integrates text, imaging, graphics (both 2D and 3D), animations, audio/video, documents, printing, and resources management APIs into a single framework, those powerful APIs and toolsets really enable developers to build rich visualization applications. The ability to seamlessly incorporate 2D content over 3D scenes and vice versa is simply stunning which gives possibility to write Northface Demo type of applications.

Charles Petzold brings in his years of Windows programming experiences to provide us with a hitchhikers' guide around Windows Presentation Foundation first from the perspective of code, then XAML (Extension Application Markup Language), which might be the ultimate UI definition language for Windows moving forward. From Chapter 1 to Chapter 17, Charles first introduces us the basic WPF controls and how they differ from traditional win32/Windows Forms counterparts, he also teaches us probably the most important core concepts of WPF such as Dependency Properties and Routed Events which is a little bit different from what we've known about properties and events in C#. He also gives us a de tour on how to write a custom layout panel to layout elements/controls in a predefined manner which is pretty useful when you want to roll up your own data presentation controls. In the unique Chapter 18, Charles aggregates what we've learnt from the previous chapters to tell us how to write a full-blown WPF application such as Notepad. From Chapter 19 to Chapter 31, the amazing XAML tour starts. Again in those Chapters, Charles still focus on the basic building block of WPF such as navigation, geometrical transformation, data binding, control templates and data templates etc, but this time, from the XAML perspective, he tells us how to declaratively specify WPF constructs, and how they relate to their code representations, which is very important, this can help developers to better understand XAML, what it can and cannot do.

Charles' book just covers hoards of WPF contents and concept which I cannot name it all, but suffice it to say that I find the book Applications = Markup + Code quite complete, informative and interesting to read. I think this book should be put onto every serious WPF developer's bookshelves, what you think?

WPF, Terminal Services & Bitmap Remoting

Everybody who has been playing around with WPF for a reasonable period of time might have known that WPF Application Processing is actually split up into two threads, they are UI thread which runs the dispatcher loop, and processes any GUI, keyboard/mouse/ink input, animation, layout and user initiated messages/events, and there is a hidden unmanaged background thread which is responsible for composing the graphical content (both in hardware or software if fallback is needed), and presenting it to frame buffer for display.

The whole architecture of WPF is built around this two threads model, and it has some of the benefits as articulated by Chris Anderson in the two-year long Channel video. One of the benefits Chris mentioned is that with the two threads model, in terminal services scenario, we can have the UI thread running in the TS server, and have the composition thread (or render thread in other nomenclature) running at the TS client console. And the communication between the two threads are handed over to the TS/RDP protocol. This can enable one interesting scenario called primitive remoting or vector remoting. And since UI thread is running at the TS server side, and it maintains the visual tree and the composition is at the TS client side, so in order to keep the client screen up to date, the UI thread will send the edits to the composition tree over the TS/RDP protocol in a highly compressed manner, this not only saves the network bandwidth, because only the edits need to be remoted, but also speeds up the client processing. This type of server/client communication also holds true in the standalone WPF application, the difference is that those two threads are running at the same Win32 process, and the inter-thread communication mechanism is used instead of the TS/RDP wire. To enable primitive remoting, both the TS server and TS client should run under Windows Vista and with desktop composition is enabled, this requirement tremendously narrows down the scenario in which the primitive remoting could be leveraged.

The upcoming .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 release would change all of this, in particular, bitmap remoting with sub region update support will always be used even if the TS server and the TS client are equipped to support primitive remoting, primitive remoting can be as good or bad as bitmap remoting, and the scenario in which primitive remoting is enabled is quite rare, because most existing Windows servers such as Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 server families don't support primitive remoting. So for any developer who wants your WPF applications to run reasonably well under TS scenario and running under TS is an important scenario for your applications, you need to take implication of bitmap remoting into consideration beforehand, there are a couple of ways from which you can improve the performance of your WPF application in TS scenario:

• Considering using as little animations as possible in your application, and if animations are indispensable, you could try reducing the DesiredFrameRate (The default value is 6O FPS) of each animations you need to use, usually 25~30 FPS should be enough, and if you don't need high fidelity animation experience, you can use a even lower frame rate.
• Considering using solid color brushes instead of gradient or tile brushes.
• Try reducing the number of "hidden redraws" your application needs to perform, "hidden redraws" will be overlaid by its most foreground redraws, but they will still be remoted which waste network bandwidth. You can visualize the "hidden redraws" using the Perforator (part of WPF Performance Suite) with "Show dirty-regions update overlay" CheckBox checked.