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Some Additional Pointers and Thoughts On RC1

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If you haven't heard, all of the various pieces you need to do development on WPF are available now for RC1.  A few things I wanted to chime in on:

--If you haven't checked out the new Cider, do it!  The XAML/Designer split view is worth downloading it alone.  It is like XAMLPad but with intellisense, color coding and more.  Plus, more and more is successfully being parsed by its design surface.

--There are no breaking changes (phew, now that is welcome relief) although there is one bug that folks should be aware of that is buried in the release notes.  It has to do with the tiering API, so if you are counting on the the tiering API and looking to release on RC1, definitely take a look.

--I am seeing some very flaky behavior with Vista, graphics card drivers (both NVidia and ATI) and some WPF applications, especially those that use video and 3D.  Symtoms include pretty bad artifacting and even some reported blue screens (haven't seen that personally).  If you are seeing any weirdness of this type, I'd be very interested in hearing about the graphics card you are using and what in WPF you are exercising that causes this.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 09, 2006
    Hi Karsten,

    Definitely seeing trouble on the Toshiba M3 laptop with Nvidia 6600 card right now with Vista 5600.

    Symptoms? The screen flickers or goes black, video performance is very poor and the machine can lock-up altogether forcing a power off. One other weird thing I'm seeing is that all my slider controls don't display properly but I'm guessing that's a different bug.

    Causes? It seems to be video that causes it. Also, outputting to a second monitor seems to make it much worse for me.

    Hopefully we'll get some new Nvidia drivers out soon :-)

    Mike.
  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2006
    I experience video flickering when putting videos half on my first- and half on my second screen regardless of any specific program.

    Multi monitoring support in windows isn't that better in vista than xp anyway :(

    Another issue with WPF is that the redraw of the window content is sometimes glitched where half of the screen shows the next frame while the other half of the screen shows the last drawn frame - seems like a buffering issue...
  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2006
    I've got an nVidia 7800GTX driving 2x Dell 24" displays. I installed Vista 5600, installed the nVidia 76.33 drivers, and I've got horid flickering and artifacting all over my desktop. It appears like it's not drawing one of the back buffers properly.

    Should be noted though that there was no problem on an identical machine. The difference with the flickering machine was that the version of XP on it had been running nTune. However nTune had only been used to clock down the card to make it quieter when running the 2D desktop.

    What's also annoying is that I can't rotate my second screen in Vista. I do my coding on a portrait screen, and run the apps on the landscape screen, so for the mean time I'm sticking to XP to do my development.
  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2006
    Check out the new NVIDIA drivers posted (96.33) or use Windows Update to update your drivers -- that apparently solves many of the NVIDIA issues.  Also, on the Tobshiba M3 laptop, I believe there is an updated BIOS you need to run Vista, although I don't have a Toshiba myself, so I can't confirm.