While we are working towards People-Ready Business, and Dynamic IT environments; we have great tools and applications in our arsenal. Windows Presentation Foundation is just one of them.

Till Windows Vista (or till release of WPF) we did only have screen elements (buttons, text boxes etc.) those have changeable colors and sizes (only). As developers, we had to play with those tools to build application UIs. But now; with the introduction of WPF we have People-Ready User Interfaces those can change themselves while interacting with the user. May be the first of a series of commercial applications is the Times Reader. Below you can have a look at the user interface of the application, and it is publicly available from http://firstlook.nytimes.com/.

The first two screenshots are the same but different size views of the application. The application itself changes the sizes of the fonts, arrangement of the articles/titles, nearly all the content when you resize the application window.

The frontiers of UI development will change with Windows Vista, and will open doors to new opportunities. If you use the Times Reader, you will notice the different places of New York Times logo and how the advertisement (which appears on the last page of the article and not on every page) is changed and placed. The advertisement is not a picture, but a series of WPF calls to pictures, text and their placement relative to the ad and to the window. This makes the advertisement fit into every screen perfectly, just like the newspaper itself.

With these dynamic UI abilities, WPF can be useful in especially dynamic reporting (e.g. business intelligence, financial), monitoring (e.g. displaying the state of Windows Servers, web servers from Microsoft Operations Manager) applications or can be used in remote education in schools. But whether it is this type of application or that type of application, WPF sure will change our perception of computing; because UI will be People-Ready from now on…