Create an Impression

Create an Impression

Windows Vista® offers everything developers need to create impressive user experiences.

Provide consistency and elegance in your user interface design by following user education (UE) guidelines. Windows Vista also provides new tools that enable users to visualize, organize, and search within applications. Finally, Windows Vista includes the Windows® Presentation Foundation, which enables developers to enrich user experiences in applications. Great-looking Windows applications are easy with Windows Vista.

Follow the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines

Windows Vista offers a new look and user experience for users, including new common controls, translucent frames, a page navigation paradigm, and a standard search feature. By following the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines, developers can provide their users with a consistent and predictable user experience.

Developers can use new controls in Windows Vista to provide this consistent experience for specific types of interaction.

Common Item Dialogs

The new Common Item Dialogs (formerly known as the Common File Dialogs) enable developers to provide new search and organization capabilities when prompting users to open and save files. The Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.0 Development Vista Bridge Sample has a managed wrapper for many of the file dialog COM interfaces. (See the "Enable users to visualize, organize and search" section below.)

Windows Vista Wizard Framework

Developers can expose application data to users in a natural and consistent way through the Windows® Aero™ shell. The Windows Aero Wizard framework provides a new look to the common wizard interface and is designed to provide a more focused experience for users. Developers now have a mechanism for offering more options to customize the user interface (UI) by replacing default command buttons with context-relevant text, resizable pages, and custom background graphics.

The Windows Vista User Experience Wizard framework gives native application developers the ability to use the Windows Vista User Experience style in their dialog boxes. This provides consistency for the end users.

Task Dialogs

Task Dialogs provide a more contextual and flexible alternative to the much used MessageBox API, including support for hyperlinks and customizable button labels and icons. In Windows Vista, task dialogs replace the message box and most other instances of a single-step prompt or error message.

New Windows Vista User Interface Elements

Windows Vista provides a number of new user interface elements. See the "What's New" article below for a definitive list and explanation of the design philosophy behind these elements.

Enrich the User Experience

Windows Vista provides a number of tools and technologies aimed at creating a fantastic user experience. The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) sets a new standard for interface-oriented application design. The Windows® SideBar and Gadgets for Windows Sidebar features offer a new way for users to interact with their desktop. DirectX® 10 is available for the first time in Windows Vista running on a new device driver model. Previous versions of DirectX are still supported. The new Desktop Window Manager fundamentally changes the way applications display pixels on the screen. Finally, the new Windows Imaging Component offers new ways of working with images and image metadata.

Windows Presentation Foundation

Use Windows Presentation Foundation to create engaging interfaces with multimedia support, vector graphics, animation, and content composition.

The WPF unifies the way developers and designers experience documents, media, and UI, providing a single runtime for browser-based experiences, forms-based applications, documents, graphics, video, and audio. Central to the WPF framework are controls that provide the building blocks for developing next-generation user experiences.

The WPF programming model makes user interfaces simpler to develop and easier to maintain. XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) is used to better separate user interface layout and composition from logic.

Other Windows Presentation Foundation resources are listed in the following table.

Windows SideBar and Gadgets for Windows Sidebar

Windows Sidebar offers a way to interact with users even when an application isn’t running. Developers can build Gadgets — lightweight mini-applications that run on the Sidebar or directly on the user’s desktop — that are always on and available to provide important information or updates.

Windows® SideShow™ enables developers to create applications specifically for devices with small displays and limited interaction models.

Windows Device Driver Model

Windows Device Driver Model (WDDM) is a new display-driver architecture in Windows Vista. This display architecture gives users a better performing, more reliable desktop experience while supporting new scenarios, graphics, and applications.

WDDM provides video content playback that rivals typical consumer electronics devices by making it easy to connect to external monitors, providing for protected High-Definition (HD) video playback, and increasing overall video playback quality.

For the first time in Windows, graphics processing unit (GPU) multitasking is possible, enabling users to run more than one GPU-intensive application simultaneously.

Finally, WDDM improves the PC gaming experience by simplifying the generalized GPU programming model for developers and maintaining a consistency in hardware capabilities, which translates into a PC gaming experience that will leapfrog that of even the latest consoles.

DirectX

Windows Vista offers a number of 3-D graphics improvements through the DirectX API. These improvements build on WDDM.

Direct3D is now integrated directly into Windows Vista, which uses the Direct3D graphics pipeline for desktop composition, the Picture Viewer, and the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Desktop Window Manager

Desktop composition is performed by the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), a new component of Windows Vista. DWM enables visual effects on the desktop as well as various features, such as glass window frames, 3-D window transition animations, Windows® Flip and Windows® Flip3D, and high-resolution support.

Windows Imaging Component

Windows Imaging Component (WIC) provides an extensible framework for working with images and image metadata. A single, consistent set of interfaces is used for all image processing, regardless of image format, so any application using the WIC gets automatic support for new image formats as soon as the codec is installed.

The extensible metadata framework makes it possible for applications to read and write their own proprietary metadata directly to image files, so the metadata never gets lost or separated from the image.

Enable Users to Visualize, Organize, and Search

Windows Vista changes how users interact with their files, messages, and other items. With new concepts such as search folders, stacks, grouping and filtering, users are no longer restricted to using folders only as a way of organizing their content. Developers can take advantage of these new concepts and capabilities in their applications, and can ensure that the data those applications create is prominent in the visualization, organization, and search experience.

Developers can use many of the Windows Vista search and organization features from within applications directly.

OLE DB Provider for Windows Search

The Object Linking and Embedding Data Base provider for Windows Search is the mechanism that Windows Vista uses to allow developers to issue queries against the Windows Vista search engine. This can be useful for programmatically searching the hard drive.

Property Provider APIs

Applications can read and write metadata across multiple file formats by using the Property Provider APIs.

Windows Explorer Browser and Namespace Explorer

Applications can host the Windows Explorer Browser and Namespace Explorer controls to provide users with the same search folder, grouping, and stacking experience as in the shell.

Integrate Custom File Formats

Applications with custom file formats can integrate with the Windows Vista visualization, organization, and search functionalities through the following extensibility mechanisms.