Windows Presentetation Foundation - a huge dissapointment

[GamblerFEXonlin]

Rant warning.

An Expos? app as been released for Vista, but they are having trouble and it is very jerky and slow. Linux got this almost instantly on an experimental XGL+Compiz release, and it was super smooth.

"Performance: Better performances on multicore configurations (thanks to OpenMP)"

http://blogs.labo-dotnet.com/simon/archive...0/06/11250.aspx

Dualcore just to tell the GPU to resize a few polygons/3d textures/back buffers?! I thought the GUI and it's contents were floating around in hardaware accellerated heaven.

Maybe the WPF is not what I had hoped, lets read on...>

"Flip-3D is directly built in the core of the composition engine. It has access to much more features than I have, using public APIs."

http://blogs.labo-dotnet.com/simon/archive...0/06/11250.aspx

Years of development and Minority Report hype and all they got is a small, mostly useless, Flip-3D feature hard-coded for a secret API. When can programs take advantage of a hardware accellerated GUI? The Windows File Explorer in Vista could have the folders and thumbnails resized by the GPU and save tons and tons of CPU usage, not to mention make the app very responsive.

But nooo they soack the GPU with a Pixel Shader 2.0 blur effect around the windows. I'd much rather the GPU be used for resizing and vector operations to make the GUI crisp and snappy, but then Microsoft and Intel wouldn't sell many new PC's.

Quarts for OSX has faster Expos?, and it is entirely in software, and an Expos? implementation and windows switching in Kororaa Linux is many times as fast on a twice as slow PC.

Microsoft:angry:ry:

[mrastudent]

You have no idea what WPF is, so I suggest you avoid trying to form opinions about it.

[chroniq]

mrastudent: still the man has a point, dual core for a stupid gui effect?

[guruparan]

You have no idea what WPF is, so I suggest you avoid trying to form opinions about it.

True,

You DONT KNOW what is WPF at all.....

Its making Vista clean...getting rid of old RAM utilized GDI+..but now desktop composition uses GPU & frees the RAM...

There are lot of upcoming Application in WPF..

And do you know that DirectX is far superior than other technologies...

[chroniq]

guruparan: i dont think that was his point, correct me if i am wrong, but his real rant isnt the "far superior" technologies .. its the hardware requirments

[guruparan]

guruparan: i dont think that was his point, correct me if i am wrong, but his real rant isnt the "far superior" technologies .. its the hardware requirments

My FAR Superior doesnt mean that... :no:

Its better than GDI & GDI+ environment... :)

But i think Microsoft really took a good decision to unify the Driver model & split out the User interface into a separate thing...

One of my system uses 128 MB GPU memory, i can use Flip 3d without any lagging when there are around 40 windows (including Visual studio .net 2005, Quicktime playing a HD movie,& mediaplayer playing a Halo 3 ad :-) )

[mrastudent]

mrastudent: still the man has a point, dual core for a stupid gui effect?

Except most people aren't having any problems. My poor little 3200+ isn't dualcore and I just finished running Vista for a month, never once noticing any performance issues related to the GUI, especially with Flip/Flip3D. Things will only get better once the Nvidia drivers improve.

But that's beside the point. The only relation between WPF and Flip3D is milcore, but based on the OP it's obvious he doesn't know the difference.

[myshkin]

So i've just downloaded that Expos? app, to test it out.

Initially it worked smoothly, then it got all stuttery and slow during the open/close animation. I just updated my nvidia drivers to 97.35, and now it works very smoothly! Even with a quicktime window playing.

My suggestion to the OP is to reboot or restart your display driver, you might be surprised.:))

For the record my hardware is an athlon 64 2.2GHzsingle core>, 1.5GB ram, and a 7800GS. So the idea that either DWM or WPF relies on multicores to work well simply doesn't fit.

[Linkinfamous]

Wow. It really would be nice if you knew what the hell WPF is. You're bitching about limitations in DWM, not realizing that WPF is the new replacement for GDI/GDI+ (Which were both pretty crummy when you wanted to do some really cool tricks).

DWM controls Flip3d and aero glass, and the animation of minimizing a window, etc.

WPF is the new method for drawing the contents of the window itself. WPF is incredible.

[Simon on the (dot)Net]

I am Simon, the guy who is developping MyExpos?.

As it has been said, MyExpos? is not developped on top of WPF. It uses DWM public APIs to arrange window thumbnails.

For your remark about dualcore optimisations, do you know that this is the cpu (and not the gpu) that can compute the placement of all the thumbnails on the desktop ? After computing that, the rendering loop computes intermediates positions for all windows, based on the computed destination and the elapsed time.

The destination computing and movement interpolation are optimised for dual core, just because it has no development time cost, and because I like the idea that my software is not an old fashioned single threaded app.

The fact that developpers have no access to the 3D transformation matrices of windows (Flip3D does uses these matrices to animate Windows smoothly and with no drawbacks on overall system performances) is not about WPF. It is a limitation of the first version of the DWM. I have had some conversations with Microsofties, and there are many chances that in vNext, DWM public APIs will be much more complete.

I repeat : MyExpose performances problems do not come from WPF, as MyExpose itself does not use WPF.

WPF is a great technology, not just because of the D3D acceleration stuff, vector graphics, composition subsystem etc. but essentially because of its programming model (yes, I know, it does not matter for final user, but for developpers and designers, it is a real revolution). A great part of the succes of Microsoft is due to the quality of their APIs, and development tools... And Microsoft is giving another great cheesecake to developpers.

[User6060]

Wow, this guy went on a huge rant and then the actual developer came to shut him up providing the facts against his baseless claims, this type of stuff always make me smile.

[destined1ne]

Wow, this guy went on a huge rant and then the actual developer came to shut him up providing the facts against his baseless claims, this type of stuff always make me smile.

couldn't have said it better myself.

[notuptome2004]

ther are currently no limtations to the WPF framework and what limtations ther might be are may not be a consern to the developers as well they have not found them yet. and do you evan know what the DWM is

The Desktop Window Manager is similar to Quartz Compositor in Mac OS X in that applications do not draw directly to screen, but instead draw to off-screen buffers that are then composited by the window manager and displayed on-screen. This allows the window manager to easily create a number of on-screen effects such as the current one displayed in Vista .

DWM is more or less a translater that takes all the request from the from the user actions on-screen and translates them after reaching the GPU and then displaying the actions on screen, Somthing like that. so ther are no limtations to what can be done If microsoft wanted to add as an update Flip 3d 2 witch could have all the fancy stuff you see in OSX Exspose they can do so but MS may not do anything like that as well Flip 3d works fine and works the way they wanted it to work, Flip 3d is great i use it all the time but you seem to think that didnt add anything else cause of some limtations ? well your wrong they didnt do anything else due to time and the fact ther happy with Flip 3d.