A layout engine which does precise and optimal size or position calculations is critical in any user interface framework for building responsive, interactive and high-performance applications. The term "layout engine" is often interchangeably used with "rendering engine" to mean code that takes markup content along with styles, templates and other formatting instructions to display content on screen. As prominent examples, you know of Trident, the layout engine in Internet Explorer, or Gecko which performs a similar function in Netscape/Mozilla family browsers. In Silverlight, we typically look at the layout and rendering engines as two distinct things rather than one amorphous entity. The former handles the math which dictates how UI elements are sized and positioned on screen, and how they may be constrained or clipped in order to fit into the bounding box. The latter deals with the logic of taking bits representing graphical objects and showing them on screen. Lets do a quick lap around
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