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One of the great new additions in 3.5 is UIElement3D, which brings input, focus, and eventing to the 3D space. To use UIElement3D, you can use the two new classes that derive from it, ModelUIElement3D and ContainerUlElement3D, or you can create your own custom UIElement3D class. In this blog post , Kurt creates a Sphere class by subclassing UIElement3D, and shows off some new 3D features in the process. Very cool! Read More...
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A lot of WPF developers know that Visual Studio 2008 will include much better baked-in support for WPF - the "Cider" team have delivered a WPF forms designer, high-quality XAML Intellisense built on top of a XAML language service rather than an XSD, a full set of project templates and integration between WinForms and WPF design-time views. But not so many people are aware of the enhancements we're making behind the scenes to the core WPF runtime, both in terms of polishing off a few rough edges and adding a small number of targeted features that will unblock a few key scenarios. I thought I'd steal liberally from a presentation the famous Kevin Moore (of WPF Bag'o'Tricks fame) delivered at an internal field conference this week, and give you a quick run-down of some of the new capabilities you'll find in this updated release. Make sure you download a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and check out both the design-time improvements and the enhanced platform features. Here's a non-exhaustive Read More...
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I just posted a new lab for learning how to use 3D in WPF. This is a great lab that I would highly recommend if you are learning WPF 3D. It shows how to do dynamic animation of 3D content as well as how to do 2D on 3D using the 3DTools . Read More...
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There is a great 3D cloth demo that has been floating around interally for awhile and shown at conferences, talks, channel 9 interviews, etc. However, we haven't ever posted the source code . . . until now. You can run it from here and download the source code here . I didn't write this code; David Teitlebaum, from the WPF team, did. He was hesitant to release it as the code isn't factored to his liking, but I convinced him otherwise. His code is interesting to read: Thing3D is my personal favorite class. It is also worth calling out that he uses no XAML and he also uses a MatrixCamera instead of the more easy-to-grok PerspectiveCamera and OrthographicCamera . And the technique he uses for morphing the mesh is to swap out vertices on the fly using a timer, again not for the feint of heart. But, if you already know 3D paradigms and are wondering how to create stunning effects like this in WPF, this source code will be illuminating for you. If you can't run the application because you either Read More...
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My next inspiration from the algorithms introduced in Flash Math Creativity was based on the work of Jamie MacDonald . In looking at his work, I quickly realized that I was going to need to brush up on my trigonometry skills. This led me to another great Friend of Ed book, Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move , which has some great trigonometry for animation explanations. You can see the results of my latest experiment here and the code is here . Just to make sure I was up an running with basic trig, I created a sine wave in 01 as follows: double x = 0; double y = 0; double angle = 0; for (int i = 0; i < 500; i++) { x += 1; y = 200 + Math.Sin(angle) * 50; Ellipse el = new Ellipse(); el.Width = 2; el.Height = 2; el.Fill = Brushes.Red; Canvas.SetLeft(el, x); Canvas.SetTop(el, y); stage.Children.Add(el); angle += .05; } Nothing fancy here. To make a circle, I changed the x to be x = Math.Cos(angle) * 50. This is the basis for doing circle and ellipse animations. Now, instead Read More...
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Check out Doninoken , an amazing WPF piece that is part of the Japanese Vista launch, done by the design agency Bascule . The aesthetic is amazing. I love how they use WPF 3D, mapping images on planes and animating the planes. (Watch for the small camera that pops up after the title screen that lets you interact with the app and zoom the camera around.) Still, how did they do it? Maya exports? Hand tweaking XAML? It is very impressive. And makes you want some sushi... Read More...
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Members of the WPF 3D team have provided a list of 3D classes and properties with performance implications, along with recommendations for optimizing performance when you use them....( read more ) Read More...
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One of the really cool features of WPF is its ability to place 2D content on 3D surfaces. For example, you can place a button control on a sphere or arrange images on a cube. However, w ith V1 of WPF, you couldn't interact with this 2D content. You could...( read more ) Read More...
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Well, it's finally here. As mentioned yesterday, the WPF 3D team had a very special announcement to make today. In the last hour, the bits have gone live on CodePlex . So what have we been getting excited about? It's now possible to build a fully 3D application that includes controls like textboxes, sliders, buttons etc. With this major advance, there's almost no limit to what you can create in a 3D environment beyond your imagination and the power of the machine. As a crude example, the screenshot to the right shows a flat plane, a sphere, a cylinder and a cone in a 3D space. The sphere, cylinder and cone each have a button on them, and they're real buttons with a Windows Vista look and feel - hover over them and they light up blue, move the mouse away and the blue fades slowly back to gray. Underneath the button on the cylinder is a textbox - you can really click on it and type in text, you can even select that text by dragging the mouse around the cylinder! Right-click works - everything Read More...
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The WPF 3D team have just started a new team blog (covering the 3D APIs in WPF, obviously). These guys have done an amazing job over a very short space of time. For a long while, WPF didn't have any support for 3D at all (it wasn't in the original PDC builds, for instance), and even after it was added, I remember a time when there were some discussions about whether to pull it from v1 in order to focus more resources on parts of the API that were considered more "core". Fortunately, it stayed in, since almost all of the most exciting customer projects I've been involved with have incorporated 3D in some shape or another and there's clearly a lot of interest in the creative opportunities introduced by 3D support. I'm really writing to give you a heads-up of an exciting announcement that they'll be making on their blog tomorrow. Ernie Booth and Karsten Januszewski also filmed a Channel 9 video with the team that will go live simultaneously; check back on their blog early afternoon Pacific Read More...
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The Woodgrove Finance Application is a great demo of how WPF can be used to create better data visualization, in this case for financial data. I've posted the source code -- there are some good nuggets in here worth exploring. Click Here To Run It Using The Finance Application The application provides a 3D visualization into a hypothetical, static porfolio. It is important to note that this application is not bound to live data. To the left is a 2D list of stocks, grouped by Small Cap, Mid Cap and Large Cap stocks. By clicking on a stock in this list, detailed information about the stock can be seen in the far right column. If you hover over the 2D stock chart, it will expand for an easier reading experience. Hovering over a stock will group it with other stocks of the same sector within that market size. For example, hovering over ArvinMeritor will also highlight Men's Wearhouse, both part of the consumer segment. This becomes interesting in terms of the 3D chart, in the center of the Read More...
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If you are following Vista, you are probably aware of the Sidebar, real estate on the desktop that can be used to host gadgets. And, if you are aware of Sidebar, you might be aware that the platform for gadgets is DHTML + Javascript. And, if you are a WPF designer/developer, you might be asking yourself if there are any ways to get WPF content into a gadget. It turns out that there are some workarounds that will allow you to get WPF into the Sidebar. However, there are drawbacks and limitations with using WPF in the Sidebar as the Sidebar does not officially support WPF for gadgets. In this post, I'm going to enumerate one way you could host WPF in a gadget which is to use XBAP and IFRAMEs. In a later post, I will talk about the other option, which is to use ActiveX controls. Before even going down the path of writing a WPF gadget, it is to decide if the cost is worth it. Can you achieve the visual effect you are seeking without WPF? If the answer is no, read on and find out what you are Read More...
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How did I miss this? Daniel's show on 3D Integration in Windows Presentation Foundation is really nice. Read More...
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I have uploaded Sandbox3D into the WPF Gallery. I added back the X, Y and Z axes using ScreenSpaceLines3D Read More...
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I've updated an MSDN article that I wrote quite awhile back called Creating 2-D and 3-D Dynamic Animations Read More...
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