Wednesday 9 July 2008

An unmanaged version of WPF coming?

This sounds incredibly interesting - it appears Microsoft are working on what looks like a native version of WPF!

Anyone heard about this or know any more about this - I would love to know some details! An unmanaged version would be great and would probably yield massive performance issues even for unmanaged WPF as a lot of the grunt work would presumably be able to be pushed to unmanaged code.

Could this be the return of the Microsoft's old Cairo project (which now seems to be being worked on by an external group of developers if I'm not mistaken - www.cairoshell.com)

Thoughts?

2 comments:

Sebastien Lambla said...

It's the MIL my friend :)

Chris Anderson always hinted they would be working on opening up the message-based unmanaged api they use as the composition engine for WPF and for the desktop composition on vista.

I want vertex shaders!

On the bright side, apparently they rewrote the com interop layer for .net 4. Theres a massive amount of investment for unmanaged developers. I for one am gonna start learning C++ properly very soon.

Neil Mosafi said...

Yeah, you're probably right. It would make sense to expose the functionality provided by the MIL to unmanaged applications.

I hope there is more than this though.. let's wait and see!

.NET4.0 stuff sounds interesting too, I am keeping my eyes and ears open for news about that! I did come from a C++ background and not sure if I want to go back there again!