\Managed DirectX and XNA Framework news

Microsoft have announced the latest update to the DirectX SDK which includes the Managed DirectX SDK. Download it here. No mentioned of managed code changes in the online ReadMe. Watch this space for updates after I install.

Managed Updates(?)

• The DirectX.cpl now has a tab titled Managed (image), which lists the names of the DirectX Assemblies that are available. The Assembly versions that are installed into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) are listed under each Assembly name. Right clicking on an assembly version provides you with a popup menu to view additional properties about the Assembly. If a both a retail and debug version of the assembly are available in the "%windir%\Microsoft.Net\DirectX for Managed Code" directory, and option to switch the selected assembly is provided.
• The "What's new" section in the help incorrectly claims that the HDRFormats sample is new, when it was actually new in the February 2005 SDK
• It is rumored (scroll down to the reply) that the managed runtime will get installed automatically with the Directx Redist. This is based on what Tom Miller told Joe at the GDC.
• The install location and folder/version naming convention of the managed SDK appears to have changed, though I'm not sure why. From the summer 2003 SDK it has always installed to %windir%\Microsoft.Net\Managed DirectX\{version}. The April 2005 SDK installs to %windir%\Microsoft.Net\DirectX for Managed Code, and has 2 different version subdirectories neither of which has any correlation to the versions previously used.
• Extensive changes to dxmut.cs (the main framework library if you use that). I've not had time to go into them in any depth but it appears most of the NativeCalls which interoped to the Win32 API have been replaced with more normal looking calls into WinForms. Should make things a little easier to understand.
• Some additions and some interface changes in MS.DX.Direct3DX.dll. This is the only managed DLL which has any changes in this version. I'll post the full list tomorrow but unless you use the FragmentLinker, PrtCompressedBuffer or PrtEngine classes you shouldn't notice any issues. The ShaderFlags enum has a NotCloneable enum added to expose funtionality added in the unmanaged DirectX library.
• As promised here is the Detailed API update. Only Direct3DX.dll has changed.

See Also: Microsoft, Technologies

CreatedByX (alternative) not only has sample code but has recently been blogging on the subject of Managed DirectX and has a couple of screen capture video tutorials available. Right now he has one on creating a basic shader and another on how to use ATIs Render monkey.

CreatedByX has a VB game programming competition where you can win VB.Net 2003, Windows 2000 and some other software and books. Details here.

Better late than never - Craig added a blog entry on how to save a DirectX image to a file.

Rom's Rants is written by Michael Russell who works at Ritual in the QA department. He has a couple of posts regarding Managed DirectX. Looks like he is writing a top down shooter. Also another one about using Quake/Doom fonts from MDX.

Chris Lovett has updated his CML viewer to use the February SDK. The code has an example of how to make a windows control that uses Managed DirectX.

Sharp3D.Math is a Math and Geometry library written in C# which could be very useful to game programmers.

You can read news about the product at the authors blog.

Riccardo Riedl has a development blog with a series of tutorials about Managed DirectX. The text is in German so you can use the excellent google translators if you do not speak the language.

It's Thursday morning and I made it in for the 9am talk, even after the late night of drinking. In fact I'm a little early so time to recap a little more from day 1. They have a wireless LAN at the conference so Hopefully you'll get to read this before tomorrow morning.

TrayGames After playing hide and seek all day with Joe and Paul from TrayGames I discovered that they were not actually hiding at all, they were just on a different floor. We had a good chat about their SDK and what kind of games they are looking for. I think there's a great opportunity for small part time indie game developers to get games published. They only gave me access to the SDK just before I left for San Francisco so I've not had time to look deeply into it. However, even with the limited documentation they currently have I had a working client and server up and running in a couple of hours. The game will be entitled "Attack of the killer debug messages" since thats all that it does. The architecture they have setup up means you start out multi player, so I could even run 2 clients. Watch for a more detailed look at the SDK in the next few weeks. Now that I'm a member I can issue invites to other wannabe developers so drop me an email if you would like to get involved, or even if you just want to play the couple of games they have online.

Talks In addition to the NVidia mobile chip talk I talked about last night I attended a talk about optimizing DirectX by Richard Huddy from ATI and a session about how ATI made the Ruby shorts. The latter was very interesting. ATI approached a film company that produce CG type films and (with some constraints on model size etc) asked them to produce a pre rendered movie. Then the ATI guys set about producing the same thing but in realtime. They talked about the shaders and techniques they used to emulate the things that are normally done in a slow rendering pass. They showed the before and after movies and my non critical eye really couldn't tell the difference. Well until the speaker paused the realtime one and started moving the camera around the scene.

The day ended with a booth crawl around the exhibitors, where we were provided with beer, snacks and piles of plastic rubbish that seems like a great idea to pick up at conferences but in reality just clutters up your office at work or your home. I resisted most of the swag, but I did get a nice freezer beer mug from Sun and 5 T-shirts. After doing the math I figure if I can get 50 nice t-shirts or 100 not so nice ones I will break even on the conference!

Eugeny's blog has several links to managed DirectX stuff. Its in Russian for those of you who speak this language.

Well in a couple of hours I will be off to catch the plane to San Francisco and my first GDC (technically I'm flying to Oakland becuase when you pay for this sort of thing yourself every penny counts so you take the cheapest flight you can find).

I think half of my luggage has a power cord or USB adapter of some kind so I should be online and posting from the conference.

Though I got several "I wish I could be there" emails, nobody offered to buy me a pint or talk about Managed DirectX. If you change your mind, drop me an email

Otherwise, watch this space for my trip report.

Tech Head Brothers is a French .Net site which has (currently) 4 Managed DirectX tutorials. They are in French but you can of course use the google language tools to translate them.

Zach Shewmaker has a blog devoted to his amateur game dev efforts. No real game dev content at the moment, just the intro.

This weeks .Net Rocks features Chris Maxwell and Randy Kim from NASA who are responsible for the amazing NASA Worldwind. If you want to skip right to the NASA stuff it starts around 11:50 in the stream.

Its really interesting that even though WorldWind loads and unloads huge amounts of data, they don't have any garbage collection issues and they didn't have any need to call the .collect() method themselves.

They also announced that the latest version of worldwind (1.3) is available for download - check out the site.

A fantastic world viewer program written in c# using managed DirectX. Read all about it here

Read about the decision to use Managed code and Managed DirectX here

WorldWind is on SourceForge. So if you want to look at source or help with an open source project go check it out

Worldwind was featured on .Net Rocks on 2/28/05. Listen to the audio here. The show features Chris Maxwell and Randy Kim who developed the application. If you want to skip right to the NASA stuff it starts around 11:50 in the stream.

Written by Lynn Harrison

Original Code download and support forum

Updated souce code availalbe on The ZBuffer downloads. (note: this contains only the code, you need to download the original source to get all the media files)

Thanks for your patience. We now resume normal service. At some point I will explain more but for now my lips are sealed. If you can guess why then you don't need to ask! The main site is back and running and the RSS feed will be back before the night is through.