Scott Guthrie blogged today about the WPF roadmap and what kind of enhancements we can expect to see coming in the next few releases. Check out the post for full details, but here’s a quick list of things to expect:
- Improved setup for WPF apps (i.e. ClickOnce enhancements)
- Improved working set and startup times
- Performance improvements including
- DropShadow and Blur effects becoming hardware accelerated (w00t!)
- Improvements to text features in certain scenarios
- Media and video performance boost
- New WriteableBitmap API to finally appease the people looking for realtime bitmap manipulation (like GDI)
- “Support for new effects API that enables you to build richer graphics scenarios” (hmm, that’s not very specific, but could this finally be the release of a hardware accelerated BitmapEffects stack???)
- Data scalability improvements including container recycling and better/simpler virtualization support
- DataGrid
- Ribbon
- Calendar/DatePicker
The best part about all of these? You do not need to recompile your apps to gain benefits from existing features that are being upgraded. If someone has the latest bits installed, your app gets all the performance gains for free. Good stuff!!!