In winforms – there's a message pump waiting for an event to happen – when that happens – the appropriate event handler in C# is called.
In WPF there's also XAML. When is that executed? Does the C# code call it or does it call the C# code? In other words: Does an event trigger C# code to run, or does it trigger XAML to be executed?
It seems (please correct me if I'm wrong) that WPF is not really different in the flow of things from winforms. The message pump will call C# event handlers, and the initialization of the form will be done in an InitializeComponent method.
The difference is just that the InitializeComponent method of a WPF form will include parsing an XAML file, so essentially, the developer is describing the initial appearance of the form using XAML instead of C#.
(Of course "C#" can be interchanged here with "VB".)
Here's some info about the wpf application and it's "lifecycle". http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms743714.aspx
And here's some info on InitializeComponent and the role it plays tying into Xaml parsing. What does InitializeComponent() do, and how does it work in WPF?
I'll see if I can find a more official post about the Xaml parsing.
From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970678.aspx
" The XAML file is parsed by the markup compiler.
A compiled representation is created for that XAML and copied to the obj\Release folder.
A CodeDOM representation of a new partial class is created and copied to the obj\Release folder.
In addition, a language-specific code file is generated for every XAML file. For example, for a Page1.xaml page in a Visual Basic project, a Page1.g.vb is generated; for a Page1.xaml page in a C# project, a Page1.g.cs is generated. The ".g" in the file name indicates the file is generated code that has a partial class declaration for the top-level element of the markup file (such as Page or Window). The class is declared with the partial modifier in C# (Extends in Visual Basic) to indicate there is another declaration for the class elsewhere, usually in the code-behind file Page1.xaml.cs. "
A XAML-Parser parses it and creates the respective CLR objects from it, that is about it.
