Esistono delle differenze tra un programma WPF eseguito su una macchina XP/2003 e una con Windows Vista ?. Essendo il framework lo stesso si potrebbe pensare di no, in realtà non è proprio così e Tim Sneath cita quali sono queste piccole differenze:

• With DWM and a WDDM-class display driver, video RAM is virtualized so you don’t have to worry about WPF being forced into a software rendering mode because it’s run out of headroom;
• 3D anti-aliasing is available on Windows Vista with a WDDM driver;
• There’s work done to integrate with other parts of the platform that take advantage of the MIL, so for example the Magnifier accessibility tool in Windows Vista scales up WPF applications using vectors rather than bitmaps;
• WPF animations on Windows Vista should be smooth and tear free if the DWM is enabled;
• The tablet PC APIs expose a few minor Windows Vista-specific features relating to gesture support.
• When remoting between two machines running Windows Vista and DWM, the client-side rendering of a WPF app will be hardware accelerated. No hardware acceleration occurs if one or more of the machines is running Windows XP; bitmap remoting will be used. The performance difference can quite significant depending on the visual complexity/use of animations in the app.

Piccoli dettagli che comunque indicano come WPF sia, più di altre tecnologie, "Vista oriented".