User Interfaces

Abstract

In this chapter, you will look at one of the most common tasks a programmer needs to perform—the art of putting pixels on the screen. In F# this is all about the libraries and API that you call, and you have a lot of choices in this area. You can create WinForms, a set of classes found in System. Windows. Form. dll. These classes allow you to create desktop applications based on forms and controls. You can create ASP.NET applications. This library is contained in System. Web. dll, which is a simple way to create server-based dynamic HTML applications. You also have the option to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which is a new library distributed with .NET 3.0 that allows you to design interfaces in an XML-based language called XAML. These three technologies (WinForms, ASP.NET, and WPF) will be the focus of this chapter. Since whole books have been written on each topic, I won’t be able to cover them all in detail. Instead, you’ll look at techniques for working with these technologies in F#.