Direct2D Debug Layer Available

Over at the DirectX blog, they’ve announced the Direct2D Debug Layer. For those of you using Direct2D, this will be a welcome addition to figuring out problems with using the API.

How DEC Failed to Enter the PC Market: A 1982 Documentary

Fanboy.com has an interesting post about DEC’s attempt to enter the PC market:

This is an promotional film produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) documents their attempt to enter the PC market in 1982. DEC owned a major chunk of the mini-computer market and to their credit they got the idea that the PC was the wave of the future and they knew they had to compete.

VMWare Workstation 7 Supports More 3D

VMWare Workstation 7 now has better support for 3D graphics with Direct3D 9.0c with Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.1 support. I’ve always liked VMWare for testing, particularly for testing installations. The one drawback with it has been the 3D support; sure, it was always great for testing business applications in multiple OS environments from a single machine, but for graphics applications it was pretty weak. Where I work, we recently bumped up the minimum OpenGL requirement to version 1.4 and that was not supported in VMWare Workstation 5. Now that VMWare 7 is out, I’ll try the upgrade and see how the new version supports our applications. I’m not expecting it to be as fast as a native machine, but I’m willing to pay a performance penalty for an environment where I can reset to known conditions quickly. Our applications are content creation applications, so while its annoying to have them perform poorly during testing, its not going to make the testing worthless.

Nick Gravelyn on SunBurn

Fellow MVP Nick Gravelyn has written a two-part article series on getting started with SunBurn.

Direct3D Test Doubles, Part 1

When developing Direct3D code using test-driven development, you need test doubles to stand in for interfaces used by your code. This way you can control the interaction of your system under test with its environment. This post is the first in a series of posts that discuss several ways you can create test doubles for the COM interfaces used by a Direct3D application.

Direct3D Graphics Pipeline Sample Code

I’ve created a project on codeplex, http://d3dgraphicspipeline.codeplex.com, to house the sample code from my book. It will also be used to distribute sample code on other Direct3D related articles that I write on this blog. Initially you will find the code from my article on description helpers, but I will be uploading the sample code from the book there in the next few days.