Skip to Main Content
HLSL and Pixel Shaders for XAML Developers
book

HLSL and Pixel Shaders for XAML Developers

by Walt Ritscher
July 2012
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
204 pages
4h 39m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from HLSL and Pixel Shaders for XAML Developers

Preface

Pixel Shaders are one of the more powerful graphic tools available for XAML programmers. I first encountered them in the Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 SP1 release and was completely smitten. It didn’t take long to learn that I could create custom shaders, commonly called Effects in WPF, and add them to my projects. Excited by the prospect, I started my research and soon learned that shaders are written in a language called High Level Shader Language (HLSL). I like programming challenges and learning new technologies, so I set off to learn more about custom shaders. I downloaded the DirectX SDK, opened the documentation, and started digging through the pages.

It was at this point that I ran into the wall of uncertainty.

Shader development is very different from working in XAML element trees, and bears little resemblance to traditional .NET programming. The overall mindset is different: the language looks similar to C but uses a quaint semantic syntax and the documentation is sparse and confusing. I found myself writing shader code and hesitantly testing the output, never quite sure what would show up onscreen.

I learned later that I’m not alone in feeling unsure when writing HLSL algorithms. I talked to countless Silverlight developers who echoed my feelings of doubt when faced with the prospect of writing custom shaders. I was reassured to learn, while attending a daylong game workshop, that many game development shops have dedicated shader developers who specialize in ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Real-Time Shader Programming

Real-Time Shader Programming

Ron Fosner

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449324995Errata Page