When
11:15 AM Saturday
Where
4201
Silicon Valley Code Camp : October 5th and 6th 2013session

What to do when WPF is too slow or how create displays using DirectX and WP

unassigned

About This Session

Window Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides a powerful set of tools for rapidly developing sophisticated desktop user interfaces (UIs); however the power comes with an significant performance overhead. In this session I will focus on what a developer can do beyond using a background thread to solve performance issues without totally abandoning WPF. This presentation is based on work do for a project which need to include a real time display of status maps for water distribution system with up to 50,000 element in a WPF based user interface The presentation will focus on three areas: 1. The WPF performance monitoring tools 2. Use of the lower overhead visual host based WPF display element including tradeoff and limitation 3. Integration of DirectX generated graphic elements into WPF displays DirectX integration offers the high display performance and allows one to take full advantage of multi-core GPUs. For reasons that will be discussed during the presentation stock WPF application can only use GPUs in a single thread mode and therefore can not take full advantage of muti-core GPUs. The DirectX integration approach was the only one, which could meet the demands of the water distribution application. The implementation was based on the WindowsAPICodePackDirectX SDK, which is available from the MSDN archives http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack , the Surface Queue Helper also available from MSDN archives http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/D3D9ExDXGISharedSurf and a set of .NET wrappers for the Surface Queue Helper Library from a blog post by . The approach was originally discussed in a blog post by rob relyea of Microsoft which appears to be lost in the MSDN archives. The January 2012 link to blog entry is broken. I have corrected several bug in the original post and will be creating a Codeplex project with the libraries and a demo application project demonstrating the use of the libraries (not the water works apps which is proprietary code) for both 32 bit and 64 bit systems Additional interfaces added in Windows 8 allow developers of Window 8 store application and Window 8 phone application to use DirectX without the need for the Surface Queue Library. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh825871.aspx The VS2012 tooling for Window 8 however does not include C# wrapper for DirectX and the WindowsAPICodePackDirectX SDK does not offer support for Windows Store Apps or Window Phone 8 apps. There is however a Open Source Project SharpDX which can provide C# Direct Wrappers for Windows 8 Store Apps and Windows Phone 8 Apps. Time permitting a discussion of using DirectX with Windows 8 Store Apps and Windows Phone 8 Apps written in C# will be include in the presentation.

Time: 11:15 AM Saturday    Room: 4201 

The Speaker(s)

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Steve Mylroie

Owner , Roietronics

An independent software consultant specializing in the Microsoft product stack Baynet officer