My last post described the problem of crafting an appropriate geometry abstraction for Bling. Bling previously solved the code problem for vertex and pixel shading, but lacked decent geometry input abstractions as well as an abstraction that supported...

One the inputs of rendering via programmable shading on a modern graphics card is a collection of vertices associated with some per-vertex properties used in shader computations. When programming the GPU, this collection of vertices is commonly abstracted...

In a recent blog post I described the principles behind Bling’s design. The primary principle is preferring programmable over fixed abstractions. But I feel that my definition of a programmable abstraction is so far unsatisfactory and undeveloped. To...

I’d like to announce a newly rewritten release of Bling with many improvements and exciting new features. Bling is a novel experiment in how WPF/UI programming can be enhanced via a lightweight domain-specific language hosted completely within C#. Bling...

Daily Prophet eat your heart out! Here is a prototype web browser we threw together in Bling :   We (myself, my intern lighting-export Li SiYu, and a former intern Wang Chao who worked on the browser part) started with code from Chris Cavanagh's...

Graphics programming often involves customizing and combining well known techniques as mathematic formulas and algorithms related to geometry, lighting, physics, and so on. For performance and architecture reasons, realizing these formulas in a real programming...

I'd like to announce a new and improved version of Bling WPF . In this version, we have redone the wrappers around WPF databinding and pixel shading for better usability, while a lot of documentation and examples have been added to the distribution and...

No, not meatballs. I've done a lot of work on Bling this month, the first of which is writing a paper on the technique used to build Bling. I've also overhauled how pixel shader effects are expressed so that even less boilerplate is required than before...

I updated Bling WPF to version 0.6, get it at the normal place ( http://www.codeplex.com/bling ). Mostly, I changed the DSL to get rid of more boilerplate code. Now you can create multiple input and parameter pixel shader effects with only a few lines...

One problem with the .NET library is the inconsistent use of radians and degrees to represent angles: System.Math angle functions assume angle are expressed in radian while WPF assumes angles are expressed in degrees. Trouble arises when you try to mix...

I’m rebranding the signal library as Bling WPF since it now contains support for expressing pixel shaders in C#. The release I’m putting out today polishes the pixel shader implementation that I released last week and fixes lots of outstanding issues...

This week I saw a great project, Brahma , on expressing shader-based GPU computation in C#/LINQ. Using Brahma, one can write a simple LINQ query to transform a matrix without ever touching HLSL code or compiler, neat stuff! The advantage of this approach...

I was reading Tim Sweeney’s write up on how fixed function GPUs and the APIs that depend on them are quickly becoming obsolete. Basically, as GPUs move toward programmable “shaders,” graphic engine writers can easily whip up their own efficient graphic...

For a while, I’ve been experimenting with reaction diffusion to provide for more “life like” surfaces. This reaction diffusion algorithm spreads colors out for a diffuse effect. To ensure responsiveness in the UI, the diffusion logic is run in a timer...

I found something on the web http://www.antigrain.com/research/bezier_interpolation/index.html about using Bezier curves to build polygons with smooth corners. Anyways, I ported this to WPF and it works very well! Basically, consider the last point (point0...

As a young PhD student about 10 years ago, I started out at the University of Utah in the lab of Jay Lepreau. Jay was an enigmatic demanding systems professor who was still genuine and approachable. I’m not sure what else to day, except that I’m still...

Check out the following small program: public partial class App : Window { [ STAThread ] public static void Main( string [] args) { var win = new App (); Application app = new Application (); app.Run(win); } public App() { ...

I would like to introduce the WPF signal library on codeplex, which is my wrapper around .NET 3.5 that provides a higher level interface to dependency properties in C#. Currently, databinding in C# and XAML is verbose and painful: you have to call BindingOperations...