Great WPF Applications: Introduction

So at last we're finally done. As of today, you can go to Best Buy, Amazon or countless other stores around the world and purchase a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows Vista. Of course, this is not really the end - as a developer, it's just the beginning, because this is the moment where we get to see how creative you can be at using the thousands of new APIs that we ship to add innovative capabilities to your own applications.

For the last few years, I've been spending much of my time working with a small selection of customers and partners who have participated in our early adopter programs. As a celebration of the general availability of Windows Vista, for the next few weeks, I'm going to try to highlight as many of those applications as I can with a new daily series of posts. Every application I'll highlight is written using Windows Presentation Foundation, and the majority of them are in production now, with many of them being available to download. You'll have come across a few, I'm sure, but many are new and some (I hope) will surprise and impress you.

This series is drawn from an internal slide deck that I've created as a portfolio of WPF applications. Even within Microsoft, every time I show the slides, people are surprised at the range and depth of applications out there. I truly believe that WPF is going to completely change the landscape of client programming: as designers and developers start to collaborate more often to build Windows applications, the bar will be dramatically and irreversibly raised.

Are you ready?