Double?!?

I feel like a quick rant…. Why on earth is the standard numeric data type used throughout WPF and Silverlight a double? 97% of the time, when you’re working with numbers in any app, a float will do you  just fine. Particularly when you’re merely dealing with layout and transforms in WPF/SL, I can scarcely [...]

Parametric Animation in WPF (What for?)

WPF animations are described through the use of Storyboard objects. They’re nice because a designer can create them in Blend and nobody has to mess with their XAML. Write a couple storyboards manually and you’ll see just how important that is. But storyboard objects animate only with respect to the simple passage of time. This [...]

WPF’s Performance Landscape

The WPF team, by design, hid what they could of the underlying mechanisms used to render graphical elements in WPF. The overall philosophy was to make WPF a designer-centric universe, where users care more about things being more or less intuitive and “just working” than the more coder-esque ideals of ensuring things work optimally, are [...]

Visual effects and the team

We at IdentityMine typically use AGILE team strategy that Microsoft rather effectively beats into your head when you use TFS to manage anything. Nothing wrong with it, certainly, but I’ve found that as a visual effects developer, my integration into the team process is… unusual. A visual effects developer, more than anything, needs to pay [...]

D3DImage Overview

D3DImage is the other new element of WPF that enables interactive, animated special effects. D3DImage is an ImageSource object… which means you can bind it to any Image or ImageBrush and insert it into your application as if it were just a bitmap. The neat thing is, D3DImages are not bitmaps, but surfaces rendered in [...]

ShaderEffect Overview

This blog is all about two new features of WPF, introduced with .Net 3.5 SP1 (downloadable here): ShaderEffect and D3DImage. I figured it’d be a good idea to give each of these a brief overview of what they are and how they work, since a majority of this blog will probably be devoted to discussing [...]

Texture vs. Surface pixel addressing in DirectX

Let’s say you’re rendering a D3DImage, and you want to blit a texture to it. The logical thing to do is draw an untransformed quad to the scene, with corners at (-1,1), (1,1), (1,-1), and (-1,-1). Those same vertices would have a UV coordinate to read into the texture at, respectively, (0,1), (1,1), (1,0), and [...]

Sampler Filters in ShaderEffect

The ShaderEffect object allows you to register a dependency property bound to a texture sampler. It has a parameter allowing you to specify whether to use nearest-neighbor (point) filtering, or bilinear filtering. Unfortunately, WPF currently appears to completely ignore this parameter. After a little experimentation, I’ve discovered a simple rule it follows: If the brush [...]