Mike Harsh shows Lester Lobo’s WPF/E photo viewer example that uses some nice reflections and some fake-3d. Unfortunately WPF/E only supports skews and rotations so you can’t do real perspective at all. Its possible to do some simple fake-3d that looks real, but the effects in this example just give me a “wrong” feeling. This is one of those cases where a visual designer can really earn their pay, since there are some careful things you can do to make the scene look more right by realizing that the vanishing point is in effect at infinity.

The history of this limitation is a bit interesting. WPF (Avalon) didn’t need the more complex transformations since it supports real 3D. WPF/E in theory is a strict subset of the WPF functionality so they didn’t add support for transformations that WPF itself can’t do. It would be great to see this improved over time so we can really emulate 3D.

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