Creating a C# Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Application in Visual Studio 2015

While console applications are great, they leave something to be desired. They are missing a graphical user interface or GUI for short. A GUI is an interface that the user can interact that has visual graphics such as buttons, icons, text, etc. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create an empty c# WPF application in Visual Studio 2015.

Let’s Get Started

First off you need to make sure that you have Visual Studio installed on your computer. I will be using Visual Studio 2015 for this tutorial, but older versions of Visual Studio should work just fine. For more information regarding Visual Studio take a look at my post Getting Started with Visual Studio.

To create a WPF application, open Visual Studio and you will be taken to the start screen. Click “New Project…” as shown in the image below or press control + shift + n to create a new project.

visual-studio-start-page

You will be taken to a new project dialog where you will choose “WPF Application” under Templates – Visual C# – Windows as shown below.

visual-studio-new-wpf-project

After giving your application a name, click “OK”. A new WPF application project is created with the name your provided. You should see a designer window with the xaml code for the window as shown below.

new-wpf-application-designer

In the solution explorer, you will see there is a code behind for the xaml which is named “MainWindow.xaml.cs”. It will look like the screenshot below.

new-wpf-application-code-behind

If you run the application in debug mode, you will see that the blank MainWindow shown in the designer is displayed as shown below.

blank-wpf-application

Congratulations! You now have a blank WPF application to do whatever you want. Now it’s time to start making applications with a GUI. If you need help getting started, be sure to check

out my other c# walkthroughs.