The magic behind WPF is all there if you look for it: content usage, routed events, styles, templates, and conversions in the XAML loader; for more on XAML basics, please see my article, "XAML: ...
It might surprise some people at Microsoft, but I've never been asked to build an application that put photographs on spinning cubes. Nor have I ever been asked to include video in my apps. I suspect ...