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Monday, May 12, 2008 - Posts
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As the Content Owner for PDC2008, I'm now a member of the Tier 1 Events Council at Microsoft. This is a group that meets a few times a year to share ideas and best practices around our largest events (like Tech·Ed , MIX, and PDC). We met all day today and covered a number of great topics. One of our sessions was titled Environmentally Sustainable Events Initiative , and it was presented by Gina Broel and Jessica Ludders. We discussed what it means to be a "green" event based on the Green Meeting Industry Council . According to the council, a green meeting incorporates environmental considerations to: Achieve economic and strategic business goals Minimize or eliminate environmental impacts Positively contribute to the environment and host communities We love to measure, benchmark, and assign metrics to just about everything we do at this company, and environmental sustainability is no different. We've looked at things like the amount of waste generated by our events, the amount Read More...
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I have a Windows Mobile 5.0 cellphone and realized recently that all my text messages were locked up on the phone -- ActiveSync doesn't sync them. There's probably applications out there that will archive your text messages, but being a dev, I figured Read More...
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The last few posts in this series on Effects have focused on the perspective of those using Effects. These Effects have to come into being somehow, and that's where we turn to now. In this post we showed how to apply a ColorComplementEffect to go from this to this: ColorComplementEffect, which very much looks like a photographic negative, is just about the simplest Effect one can imagine. Conceptually, all it does is take the RGB color components and create a new color with each component subtracted from 1.0. Let's first show what it takes to write it and add it to your app, then we'll expand and generalize from there in the next post. Creating the HLSL for color complement Here's some simple HLSL for doing the color complement. Note that this series is not in the least intended to be an HLSL tutorial. There are a bunch out on the Net, and there is also a Programmer's Guide and Reference Guide on MSDN that can be a good place to start. Also starting from existing examples (like those included Read More...
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The last couple posts in this series have dug into features and example usage of Effects in WPF. Let’s go into some other aspects of the feature that are important to understand. Software Rendering When we discuss Effects, we typically talk about them being GPU-accelerated. This is typically the case. However, there are three important situations where the Effects cannot be GPU-accelerated: When the graphics card being run on does not support PixelShader 2.0 or above. This is becoming more and more rare, but is definitely still out there. When the WPF application is being remoted over Remote Desktop or Terminal Server or some other kind of mirror driver. When the WPF application is in a mode where software rendering is required – such as rendering to a RenderTargetBitmap, or printing. In all of these cases, WPF will render Effects via software. What does that mean? As mentioned in an earlier post, Effects are written using HLSL for programming the GPU. WPF incorporates a “ JIT ter” (Just-in-Time Read More...
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My previous post on Effects (part of this series ) gives a simple example of instantiating an parameterless Effect (it just takes the complement of a color) through XAML. Here we discuss more about the use of Effects. First, lest you think that Effects are somehow a XAML-only feature, let’s write some code to use Effects. Recall that the invocation of the Effect through XAML looked like this: < Grid > < Grid.Effect > < eff : ColorComplementEffect /> </ Grid.Effect > < Image ... /> < Button ... / > < TextBox ... / > </ Grid > In code, presuming I already have the Grid and it’s called “myGrid”, we’d just do the following: myGrid.Effect = new MyEffects. ColorComplementEffect(); Like everything else in WPF, Effects are readily creatable and manipulable through code. Given that, most of the below will focus on usage through XAML just because it’s the most succinct way of expressing the usage. The ColorComplementEffect is very limited in what it Read More...
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With WPF 3.5 SP1 on the horizon (and the Beta available now ), I plan to discuss some of the new graphics features that are coming into WPF in this release. There are a number of great new additions as well as improvements on existing features, but I will say that the one that I’m the most excited about is GPU-accelerated custom effects. I’m going to go into a good amount of depth in a series of upcoming blog posts, so I’ll dedicate this one to talking about the basics of what we’re offering and the motivation behind the feature. One of the hallmarks of WPF is the ability to mix and match media types, to compose visual elements, and to give the developer a substantial amount of freedom in the way they construct the interfaces for their applications. However, they are typically restricted to using the building blocks that WPF provides, such as rectangles, text, video, paths, gradients, images, etc. As rich as that set of primitives is, it is still a fixed set of primitives that only has Read More...
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GPU-based Effects are a hot new feature in WPF for .NET 3.5 SP1. I'm going to be blogging a series of articles with progressively more detailed information in them, and am using this post as a place to store a table of contents of these posts. Here's what's out there so far: GPU-accelerated custom Effects for WPF Using Effects in WPF (Part 2) More details on how Effects work Writing custom GPU-based Effects for WPF Read More...
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Today I'm excited to announce the public beta availability of a major new release of WPF. Since we shipped .NET Framework 3.5 late last year, the team has been hard at work at a new release that adds many supplemental features, fixes a good number of bugs, offers many performance optimizations, and includes a new streamlined installer for a subset profile of the .NET Framework optimized for client scenarios. This new release will ship as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 later this summer; the beta release is an early preview of these enhancements. In this blog post, I want to provide a broad overview of the new features in this release, focusing on WPF. Download links: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta) .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions SP1 (Beta) Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (Beta) Deployment It's been interesting over the last year or two to see the balance between business and consumer applications developed Read More...
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