Informikon

I'll start to write some material about DirectX and C#. In this entry, I would like to justify this choice. First, I am interested in 3D graphics and multimedia; the technology is getting interesting and having a nice mathematical background can only help. Moreover, Galois.Net is just an xml-wrapping around geometric logic, so I have been wondering, for some times now, how I could generate some nice "pictures" of these abstract mathematical objects.

Now, you can program graphics with OpenGl or DirectX. I will not enter in those endless debates about which one is better. If you are only interested in 3D graphics, OpenGl and Direct3D are essentially equivalent. DirectX contains many other APIs beside Direct3D but they are restricted to the Microsoft platform.

DirectX is a COM-base API and you normally use C++ to program high-performance graphic applications. But in the past couple of years, Microsoft has released managed versions of most of the DirectX APIs (the notable exception being DirectShow). The performance of the managed version is pretty good and its use in C# is quite nice.

So I intend to write materials on Direct Graphics (aka Direct3D) and DirectShow (through interop). For many applications, you can get some very decent applications running up, fairly quickly, using C#, .Net and the Managed DirectX (or DirectShow/interop). As with many APIs provided by Microsoft, the documentation is good but you'll need more hand-on materials to feel confortable. So I'll try to fill some of this void.

At the moment, Tom Miller's book (who wrote the managed version of DirectX) is a very good introduction to 3D graphics and DirectX. The resources for DirectShow are more limited. To access it from C#, the best place to start, as far as I know, is at www.codeproject.com which has a few samples.

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