Devcenter

Whenever I teach a debugging class, the first thing I talk about is one of the most important points I make though the entire class: read Steve McConnell’s masterpiece, Code Complete 2nd Edition. I ask for an honest show of hands as to who hasn’t read Code Complete, and it always amazes me how many…

Another new and notable feature of Silverlight 3 is support for hardware acceleration. In Silverlight 1 and 2, all rendering was done in software, which meant that the performance of complex animations and video playback depended heavily on the capabilities of the host PC. Silverlight 3, however, can take advantage of hardware GPUs. You can…

Silverlight 3 is loaded with new graphical goodies, and one of the goodies I’m most excited about is pixel shaders. A pixel shader is an object that transforms pixels output from the rendering pipeline before they’re rendered to the display surface. Silverlight 3 Beta 1 comes with two pixel shaders: BlurEffect and DropShadowEffect. The following example…

I’m packing up my stuff to head for Atlanta tomorrow and speak at MSDN’s Southern Fried Roadshow. If you attend, you’ll get to see a demo that I just put the finishing touches on. It uses dynamic Deep Zoom (that is, Deep Zoom with image tiles that are generated on the fly rather than by Deep…