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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

Foreword

Pete Brown

XAML and Blinking LED Gadget Guy, Microsoft

As developers, we often find ourselves in a position where we need to learn a new programming or markup language in order to support our primary development tasks. Desktop programmers end up learning XML and XSLT. Web programmers find SQL is a necessary part of their skillset. C programmers on microcontrollers find they really need some inline assembly for a critical section of code. HTML/JS tends to be one of those skills everyone is expected to have. And yes, Silverlight, WPF, XNA, and C++ developers find they must write HLSL to provide just the right effect at the maximum possible performance. The day of the one-trick pony is rapidly coming to an end.

Typically, these languages augment our applications; they help get us past roadblocks, and perhaps most importantly, they present a different way to think about programming. It’s this last point I consider the most important: polyglot programmers are the ones who tend to come up with the best solutions to problems, because they have a larger universe of possible ideas, approaches, and algorithms to choose from.

HLSL is different enough from our regular workhorse-language programming that we can’t help but learn some new techniques from it. Instead of explicit loops in a function, the algorithms work with individual pixels or vertices with code which is being called millions of times under external control. Instead of being spun through on a single thread on the CPU, or ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449324995Errata Page