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

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 ...

Tim Sweeney at JHU

Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, gave a lecture on "Programming the Next Decade of CPUs and GPUs" at Johns Hopkins University yesterday. JHU is a quick drive from my house, so I thought I'd swing by. I met Promit and some of his co-workers from Day One, and we ...

In the Trenches with MSBuild, Part II

I took some time last weekend to work on my build system again. My last post on the subject was aimed primarily at pointing out some of the issues and idiosynchrasies I uncovered trying to revamp the existing build process. This post, drawing upon what I learned the last time ...

SlimDX and the November DirectX SDK

The November DirectX SDK recently became available. Overall, there's nothing earth-shattering in there, just some routine updates. One notable collection of bullet points deals with the things that are no longer in the SDK -- DirectInput below version eight, Direct3D below version nine, some really archaic interfaces you may not ...

In the Trenches with MSBuild, Part I

I devoted this past Sunday to exploring MSBuild so that I could add some extra functionality to my build process. I got things working -- or at least, I got a foundation upon which I can build later on... after I wash the bitter taste of disappointment out of my ...