YA.NB - Yet Another .Net Blog

HLSL is mature language that enables developers to address the graphics hardware in a familiar, C-like way. Next to vertex shaders, you can use it to write pixel shaders, which is what - with .Net version 3.5 SP1 - Microsoft introduced into WPF. What sounds like no big deal at first sight is a major leap towards serius WPF / Silverlight game development and - more generally - graphically intensive UI. That goes hand in hand with the DirectX-powered concepts of WPF, finally giving .net developers a good deal of acceleration without the need for unsafe code. Since we're not doing heavy calculus on our GPU, even decent hardware is sufficient to display manipulated images. Since the death sentence of XNA , hopes were shallow that .Net developers get in touch with this cool technology, but we've always loved the walking dead, haven't we? Quite a few WPF Pixel Shader libraries and tutorials have popped up (Some are linked below), and I really recommend getting in touch with the...

After mobile Flash has been jilted, there's (more or less official) word out on the street that Silverlight 5 will be the last iteration of Microsoft's web interaction platform. Eventually, HTML5 seems to be the next big thing, and among many other reasons for the first major release of the web standard in ages, the following make most sense for me: No Framework or runtime required  open specification in future, every browser will implement it without a plugin (bringing an end to license hell) Microsoft sure knows how to amaze developers, and with the incarnation of XAML, have given us a toolset that enables us to develop for the web, the mobile and the windows platform in the same comprehensible way. HTML5 is supposed to do the very same thing, and in addition enable us to develop for iOS and other non-.Net-aware platforms as well, all with the help of JavaScript (yuck!). That's what I call zombie technology : I thought JS was dead, but here it comes, stabbing us ...