3 ms·

You can park a DirectX context in a WPF window or control. From there it is off to the races, implementing anything you can imagine from scratch.

by douche 9y ago

m0ther 9y ago
I don't understand why Microsoft has been keeping this a secret for so long. If you want a taste of what can be done in WPF when you take the training wheels off; find yourself a copy of the now discontinued Windows Media Center. It's UI is built on WPF. It's such a shame WPF is in maintenance mode instead of active development. I'd imagine a big reason for that is that it didn't gain the level of popularity Microsoft hoped it would. I don't think they did a good job of explaining and evangelizing it since release. UWP/Win2d seems to be what was meant to replace it, but it doesn't offer the same level of control and compatibility at all. I'm sure there's some grand long term plan I'm not privy to, but I'd be much happier in the short term if we could stop pushing windows store apps and get back to building frameworks for the hardcore. Did you know there was a managed version of DirectX 9? Have you looked into C++/CLI? I'd love to understand the story of why the .net initiative changed direction in the last decade. I'd love to hear the master plan.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The master plan is very easy to explain by any long time Windows developer (back to 3.x days). The political wars between WinDev (Windows and C/C++) and DevTools (Visual Studio and .NET) divisions. With the mismanagemnt that happened with Longhorn, the WinDev gained in strenght Vista and Windows 7 happened, pushing aside all .NET related plans into DevTools alone. Then with the failure of the initial store model, the DevTools kind of won in strenght got some of the ex-Midori devs, MDIL compiler became .NET Native and at the last couple of BUILDs you very barely see any talk about using C++ for UWP, rather portability across Linux/mobile OSes and ANSI C++ compatibility, everything else is shown in C#.

You can park a DirectX context in a WPF window or control. From there it is off to the races, implementing anything you can imagine from scratch.

by douche 9y ago

You can park a DirectX context in a WPF window or control. From there it is off to the races, implementing anything you can imagine from scratch.

m0ther 9y ago

I don't understand why Microsoft has been keeping this a secret for so long. If you want a taste of what can be done in WPF when you take the training wheels off; find yourself a copy of the now discontinued Windows Media Center. It's UI is built on WPF. It's such a shame WPF is in maintenance mode instead of active development. I'd imagine a big reason for that is that it didn't gain the level of popularity Microsoft hoped it would. I don't think they did a good job of explaining and evangelizing it since release. UWP/Win2d seems to be what was meant to replace it, but it doesn't offer the same level of control and compatibility at all. I'm sure there's some grand long term plan I'm not privy to, but I'd be much happier in the short term if we could stop pushing windows store apps and get back to building frameworks for the hardcore. Did you know there was a managed version of DirectX 9? Have you looked into C++/CLI? I'd love to understand the story of why the .net initiative changed direction in the last decade. I'd love to hear the master plan.

pjmlp 9y ago
The master plan is very easy to explain by any long time Windows developer (back to 3.x days). The political wars between WinDev (Windows and C/C++) and DevTools (Visual Studio and .NET) divisions. With the mismanagemnt that happened with Longhorn, the WinDev gained in strenght Vista and Windows 7 happened, pushing aside all .NET related plans into DevTools alone. Then with the failure of the initial store model, the DevTools kind of won in strenght got some of the ex-Midori devs, MDIL compiler became .NET Native and at the last couple of BUILDs you very barely see any talk about using C++ for UWP, rather portability across Linux/mobile OSes and ANSI C++ compatibility, everything else is shown in C#.