History & Future
Just like Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT), the equivalent Java API, Windows Forms was an early and easy way to provide graphical user interface components to the .NET Framework. Windows Forms is built on the extant Windows API and some controls merely wrap underlying Windows components
Windows Forms provides a cross-platform way to design graphical user interfaces. However Windows Forms is mainly a wrapper around the Windows API, and some of the methods allow direct access to Win32 callbacks, which are not available in non-Windows platforms.
With the release of .NET 3.0, Microsoft released a second API for rendering GUIs: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), together with a GUI declarative language called XAML. However, even though both Windows Forms and WPF offer comparable functionality, Windows Forms has not necessarily been superseded by WPF, but is simply another tool for Windows desktop application that will continue to exist parallel to WPF.
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Famous quotes containing the words history and/or future:
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)