Well, I’ve been off the air for quite some time, and now have the opportunity to pop up and talk about what I’ve been working on lately.  I made the switch from focusing on building platforms like Silverlight, WPF and the Desktop Window Manager to...

Troy Jefferson interned this summer with the WPF team and gathered a bunch of Effects that had been written by members of the WPF team.  These are now available for downloading on CodePlex .  At that same site, you can also browse to a video...

In my last post , I introduced multi-input effects, where you can send in arbitrary WPF brushes that are interpreted as samplers in the shader. The example I did just showed simple image combination via linear combination of pixel values -- illustrative...

Thus far in this series on Effects , we've discussed building and using Effects that have a single "texture" or "sampler" as input to them. In the Beta of .NET 3.5 SP1, that's all that was available. With the RTM release, we've added the ability to provide...

In a number of places in this series on Effects , I've alluded to a VisualStudio BuildTask and project templates that ease the authoring of shader-based Effects.  We now have one up and available for you to download, install, and use.  This...

Alright!  .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 are live and available on the web today.  There are lots of places to read about all the great stuff there, but from the perspective of this blog, the two big additions over the Beta of .NET 3.5 SP1 are...

As you can see from this and other blogs, there's lots of exciting stuff going on in WPF these days, and we're hiring!  Ivo Manolov, our Test Manager has a post about job openings in Quality Assurance for WPF, including a posting for a Test Architect...

A couple of posts ago , I wrote about writing custom Effects.  The example that I dove into was ColorComplementEffect, an Effect that has no parameters other than the incoming "sampler" that it inverts the color on. This post is going to...

The previous post in this series began to talk about writing custom Effects for WPF. We looked specifically at ColorComplementEffect, an effect with no parameters. In upcoming posts, we'll get into the details of multi-parameter effects and other specifics...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Sean Cullinan, of blendblog.net , recently posted a VB.NET port of the Planerator . 

My previous two posts ( here and here ) discuss usage of the Planerator control.  There are some unique issues that needed to be resolved in the implementation that WPF geeks might be interested in.  If you just are interested in using it, and...

My previous post introduced a simple, but very powerful custom WPF control called a Planerator. That post contained some screenshots, but there's nothing like a live demo. So here's an XBAP demonstrating the Planerator in action. Click on "Go" to start...

[UPDATED: November 26, 2007 - updated source code zip one last time.] [UPDATED: November 7, 2007 - updated source code zip and made a few clarifications.] When incorporating 3D support into WPF, we strived for integration with the rest of the system,...

There was a query on the MSDN forums for WPF the other day that asked about leveraging multiple processors in WPF applications. I responded, and am basically repeating that response here, with a little bit of extension: WPF 3.0 (and the version coming...

Microsoft Live Search Maps (aka Virtual Earth) at http://maps.live.com , is fantastic web technology that just keeps on getting better and better with birds-eye views, persistent collections, directions, etc. However, given that its rendering is straight...

XAML is definitely the way to go whenever possible when you're writing WPF and Silverlight apps, due to its amenability to tooling, analyzability, side-effect-free-ness, etc. However, there are occasionally (or often, depending on what you're doing) times...

In my last post , I said that "one of the more subtle aspects of the otherwise pretty straightforward ParallaxUi is the ‘registration' between the 2D and the 3D", and proceeded to discuss how this is done. This amounted to figuring out how far back to...

One of the more subtle aspects of the otherwise pretty straightforward ParallaxUi is the "registration" between the 2D and the 3D. This comes into play when you just move ever so slightly off-angle, and the view goes from the 2D view of the UI to a 3D...

I've cleaned up the source to ParallaxUi a bit and am attaching it to this post as a .zip file. This has a VisualStudio solution that contains three VisualStudio projects: ParallaxUi - the custom decorator that creates the Parallax UI and exposes properties...

As I mentioned in my last post , one of the guiding principles for the design of 3D in WPF is the consistent and powerful integration with 2D vector graphics, media, imaging, UI, and documents. And, for quite some time, I’ve wanted to write a little demo...