MSDN Webcasts on 3D and 2D Game Development in Managed DirectX

I love Managed DirectX.  I thought I was going to stop loving it as Windows Presentation Foundation fermented, but I love it just the same now.

WPF - Avalon - is not a games engine.  Avalon is about ease-of-use.  About abstracting you away from hard stuff.  About opening new worlds of integrated graphics and visualization to developers who don't want to understand the dark arts of graphics.

Managed DirectX is about power.  It's about hitting the sweet spot.  The Lagrangian point, if you will, between performance (approx. 98% of the speed of a C++ DirectX application) and ease of development (usually about 50% of the code of the equivalent C++ app, plus managed memory, your .NET language of choice, the Visual Studio 2005 experience, and so on). 

If you want to write games that are on the graphical bleeding edge, which take advantage of concepts like pixel and vertex shaders, you want Managed DirectX.  If you don't know what shaders are, and don't care, you want Avalon.

Check out these MSDN Webcasts, which cover both 2D and 3D game development.  They're being billed as a fun way to learn how to develop managed code in C#.  Too right!

And as always, The Z Buffer is an amazing Managed DirectX resource.  And Tom Miller's blog.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  January 19, 2006
  Jeff -- this is my take on things. Don't get me wrong, Avalon is VERY, VERY powerful. It integrates concepts of video and UI and 3D -- and it's all very fast, and it leverages the power of your graphics card.
  
  But WPF is not DESIGNED to be used to write the next AAA game title. Managed DirectX, however, very well could be. It mirrors the DX APIs, and as such, gives you an immense amount of power and control. If I had more hours in my days, I'd be coding up a storm in it still.
  
  And I still can't wait to see what the world does when everyone has Avalon in their hands. It's just -- I'm not expecting games :)
• Anonymous
  November 09, 2006
  On Tuesday I attended Mike Pelton's session about how to choose between WPF and DirectX for rendering