By Oleg Zhukov on 12/22/2007 12:39 PM

Whereas the Windows Presentation Foundation (a part of .NET 3.0) introduces pure .NET classes for drawing simple 3D graphics, its functionality may be not enough for feature-rich 3D applications. If this is the case, some more powerful graphics library may be required, such as OpenGL. Fortunately a managed .NET facade to unmanaged OpenGL dll's exists. This facade is a part of the Tao framework and allows accessing OpenGL functions from .NET applications as easily as it is done from managed C/C++ code.

Last few days I have been experimenting with OpenGL in .NET and have written a small application which visualizes 3D objects specified in a binary STL file format. The application allows moving and rotating the camera (eye point) and switching between different rendering options (sm ... Read More »

By Oleg Zhukov on 10/21/2007 2:14 PM

Sometimes building a software product from the source code requires more than just compiling. That is the case especially for big software systems where the build process consists of numerous steps.

A long long time ago (don't ask when :) the MAKE utility appeared to solve this problem. It offered a rather powerful scripting language for describing the build process. But time went by and new utilities came to substitute MAKE. They didn't have the drawbacks peculiar to MAKE and used XML as a script format. One of such tools was Ant and its .NET clone named NAnt. Microsoft suggested their own build tool too (well, that was expected :) under MSBuild name. Here I would not devle into MSBuild and Ant comparison, but I am going to list the things that really make MSBuild attractive compared to NAnt:

• Tight integartion with Visual Studio IDE. Actually VS projects are MSBuild scripts. And modifying the project means just modifying the MSBuild script. An ... Read More »
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By Oleg Zhukov on 6/10/2007 4:32 AM

The majority of .NET developers are still sitting on 1.1 and 2.0 versions and are thinking of all those troubles they will meet moving to 3.0 and 3.5. However there are no reasons for pessimism since 3.0 and 3.5 are based on 2.0 and utilize the same CLR 2.0 version. This is the case when 3.5 - 2.0 < 1.5. In his recent post Daniel Moth explains this in detail. The difference between VS2005 and upcoming VS2008 is not as much either. See another Moth's post about VS2008 stack.