In this section, you’ll find articles about particular development activities, tasks or techniques. These articles tend to focus on implementation discussions.

PSPCLR: Implementing newobj

PSPCLR just recently turned five bits old. The commit that brought the repository revision to 16 was actually pretty large, in terms of files touched, but most of the changes are actually just a result of some fairly heavy refactoring I've been doing slowly over the last few weeks. In ...

Using XSLT to Generate Code

The last time I talked about XSLT was quite a while ago. I was using XSLT to generate wiki markup for both my personal projects and for SlimDX. It's worth noting that we have abandoned the wiki markup documentation in SlimDX, however -- it didn't look or operate as nice ...

COM and SlimDX, Part II

Earlier, in "COM and SlimDX, Part I," I discussed an early design decision that was made in SlimDX that prevented us from supporting the idiomatic C# pattern for disposal of unmanaged resources. In closing, I mentioned that our new solution, while a huge leap forward, still had some problems. Today we'll ...

C# on the PSP

I put some custom firmware on my PSP last week. Then I put a homebrew development environment on my PC. Then I wrote a Common Language Runtime for the PSP, and now I can run the prototypical C# Hello World program from my PSP. For the gory details, read on. Getting ...

COM and SlimDX, Part I

The last few months have been fairly busy, and a good portion of that is due to the upcoming SlimDX March release, which we expect to package and ship shortly after the official March DirectX SDK update becomes available. Since the DirectX team changed up their release schedule, there's been ...

Shade: Conversions

Previously, I described the type system Shade uses for connections between shader fragments. Today I'm going to discuss the process by which conversions are searched for. An individual conversion in Shade is a simple thing, essentially a conversion is a highly-specialized shader feature. A conversion has semantic types for input ...

Shade: Semantic Types

Recall that when you work with Shade, you're basically just dropping little nodes on a layout surface. Each node represents some kind of effect feature you'd like your finalized shader to exhibit, and each node has a number of input and output parameters you can connect to form a graph ...

Shade: Basic Concepts

Shortly after first writing about Shade I recieved some comments requesting more information about the tool and how it works. The short answer is "poorly" -- it's still very much in the "proof-of-concept" stage. You can create shaders with it, but I haven't built up a solid feature library and ...

Musing on Visual Shader Tools

Recently, I started working on a visual shader construction tool; something along the lines of the Unreal material editor, the now-unavailable ShaderWorks, and the visual render path tools present in modeling packages like Maya and Blender. I also borrowed heavily from some concepts presented in Morgan McGuire's "Abstract Shade Trees" ...

Using XSLT to Create Wiki Markup

In my second post detailing my forays into MSBuild, I mentioned using XSLT to transform the XML documentation produced by the C# compiler into wiki markup. The primary motivation behind this was so I could integrate the API reference with the rest of the documentation for my framework, providing a ...