With today’s release of .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1, a whole new level of support for DirectX interop is now possible in WPF. Using the new D3DImage feature in WPF, a custom DirectX scene can now be composed with a WPF scene without the irritating airspace restrictions from medieval days of yore. 🙂
To help developers get started with D3DImage, I have published the following article on Code Project:
This truly is a cool new feature and definitely worth a look!
Thanks for that article, was the first thing I could find on 3.5 SP1 immediately post RTM! Was expecting a scottgu post, but no love…
I wonder what the odds of making a D3DImage-based drop in replacement for the WindowsFormsHost would be? I assume most users previously would’ve been using something like this to get that nasty windows handle to render to 😉
Hey craigomatic,
Yeah, I think there is definitely opportunity to do something cool with interop between WinForms and WPF, but since WinForms is a GDI+ technology, there will always be limits to the perf gains.
In fact, an early version of the WindowsFormsHost control used a double-buffered approach to compose the WF rendering with the WPF rendering, but the perf was so bad that it was abandoned. (Well, to be fair, there were other issues besides perf.) Of course, that was an entirely different rendering pipeline (pre-D3DImage) so it would be cool to see what could be achieved now. But it will have to be done by someone who actually has a vested interest in WF… which I’m happy to say is not me! 😉
Cheers,
-dw