With all the fuzz about the dead of Silverlight, we should almost forget that it still has a big brother WPF.
After the announcements at Build it looks like that WPF isn’t dead either. It even has some very useful new and enhanced features
- Ribbon control: WPF 4.5 ships with a Ribbon control that hosts a Quick Access Toolbar, Application Menu, and tabs.
- Improved performance when displaying large sets of grouped data
- New features for the VirtualizingPanel
- Binding to static properties: You can use static properties as the source of a data binding. The data binding engine recognizes when the property's value changes if a static event is raised.
- Accessing collections on non-UI Threads: WPF enables you to access and modify data collections on threads other than the one that created the collection. This enables you to use a background thread to receive data from an external source, such as a database, and display the data on the UI thread. By using another thread to modify the collection, your user interface remains responsive to user interaction.
- Synchronously and Asynchronously validating data: The INotifyDataErrorInfo interface enables data entity classes to implement custom validation rules and expose validation results asynchronously. This interface also supports custom error objects, multiple errors per property, cross-property errors, and entity-level errors.
- Automatically updating the source of a data binding: If you use a data binding to update a data source, you can use the Delay property to specify an amount of time to pass after the property changes on the target before the source updates.
- Binding to types that Implement ICustomTypeProvider
- Retrieving data binding information from a binding expression
- Checking for a valid DataContext object
- Repositioning data as the data's values change (Live shaping): A collection of data can be grouped, sorted, or filtered. WPF 4.5 enables the data to be rearranged when the data is modified.
- Integrating WPF with win32 Graphical User Interfaces(My favorite!): WPF 4.5 provides better integration between WPF and Win32 user interface components.
- Improved Support for Establishing a Weak Reference to an Event: Implementing the weak event pattern is now easier because subscribers to events can participate in it without implementing an extra interface. The generic WeakEventManager class also enables subscribers to participate in the weak event pattern if a dedicated WeakEventManager does not exist for a certain event.
- New methods for the Dispatcher class: The Dispatcher class defines new methods for synchronous and asynchronous operations.
- Markup Extensions for Events: WPF 4.5 supports markup extensions for events. While WPF does not define a markup extension to be used for events, third parties are able to create a markup extension that can be used with events.
More information and all the details here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb613588(v=VS.110).aspx.