I have been doing so research lately for a new project and have ended up more confused than before I started. I know similar questions have been done to death but I can’t seem to find any good information on what I need to do. I’m hoping somebody here will be able to offer some advice.
I need to embed DirectX into a .NET application with a modern Windows UI (toolbars, menus, ribbon if possible). I have prototyped the DirectX part of the application in XNA for proof of concept but I do not need to stick with it, re-writing isn’t a problem. It would be nice to take advantage of the UI goodness from WPF but anything in .NET would be an option (WinForms etc).
The application does not do anything hugely complex:
- It loads of a bitmap image into a texture (or a few textures as the image is often quite large)
- Renders to off screen target (applying a pixel shader based on another texture) and gets the result back as a texture
- Renders to the window with another pixel shader applied
- Pan and zoom of resulting image
The problem is that all my research on-line discounts options but does not suggest an alternative. For example I have read that:
- Managed DirectX in .NET is now unsupported
- Embedded my XNA application in Winforms or WPF isn't recommended
- WPF supports pixel shaders but doesn't seem to get much love for performance
What is the standard for embedding DirectX into modern Windows applications (if one even exists)? We can’t be the only people wanting to do this in .NET.
What would people recommend?
There’s two libraries which would be of help:
Both are pretty complete, there’s also some samples with WPF interop.