more comments on my flip3d post...
"JoeW" says:
Echoing the point above - does any of the shell components using DirectX provide their own API? How much of WPF is being used here? If there is an unmanaged API will it be public?
MS has been mysteriously quiet about the level of integration of WPF into Vista. It sounds like there are two separate composition engines.
We didn't write two compositing engines for Windows Vista. There's a single composition layer that uses D3D that was originally developed for WPF and is used directly by the Desktop Window Manager to composite the desktop. The public API exposed for using the composition system is managed-only through WPF.
The DWM itself offers up a very small API that's focused on enabling applications to have "glass" inside the client areas of their Windows - this will be available for all applications, but was originally developed for clients written in native code like Windows Explorer, so access to these through managed code would be accomplished either by using Managed C++ to load the dll or p-invoke. I realize this isn't ideal in that it doesn't fit with the programming model of WPF, but we'll be sure to provide samples with Beta 2 that should make life easier for folks. If you attended PDC'05, you may have seen a bit about these API's in Jeff Pettiross' talk about building great Aero applications.
"J" pointed me to
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ and asked if we'd see anything like this in tablet pc's. It reminds me of some of the
Play Anywhere work
Andy Wilson is doing in Microsoft Research.With regards to TabletPC's, it's certainly possible...
N-trig is a company that makes some really neat touch-based digitizers for tablet pc's that could really enable some exciting stuff on this front.
"ion" asks if we're doing any work to make non-DWM scenarios better in Windows Vista. None of the DWM-based features (Flip3D, etc.) will be available in non-composited modes, because they were designed to take advantage of the composited desktop. Window repainting will always be better in composited scenarios than non-composited, but you should some some performance improvements in both composited and non-composited scenarios as we do more and more optimization as part of getting closer to shipping.
