Since early on in the development of Windows 8, we’ve been thinking about ways to combine UI, such as the rich set of controls and interactivity provided by XAML, and graphics, like the low-level, high-performance rendering of DirectX.
The feedback you gave for the Developer Preview through the Dev Center forums and other channels helped us focus on the set of related scenarios that developers really wanted to build. We saw some common themes: many of you wanted to either add DirectX graphics to what could otherwise be called a XAML app, or easily add Metro style UI to a DirectX app.
Good news! With the release of the Consumer Preview, you no longer have to draw a hard distinction between a XAML app and a DirectX app. You can now tap into the strengths of both XAML as a rich UI platform and DirectX as a high-performance rendering solution within the same app, using a familiar XAML model.
Now that you can combine these, you really get the best of both worlds. This opens up a wide range of possibilities – some of the key scenarios you told us about included things like:
Image processing, creativity, and design apps that blend UI and graphics
Large-scale map and document viewers, that mix huge DirectX graphics and some UI
Games and simulations with full-screen, high-performance DirectX graphics and minimal overlaid UI
where the combination of XAML and DirectX can make developers more productive and apps richer and faster.
Metro style UI in Windows 8
XAML – in parallel with HTML/JavaScript – is a UI toolkit for all types of apps in Windows 8, providing constructs for interactivity, Metro style controls and animations, and rich functionality like accessibility support, databinding, media, and HTML hosting. You also benefit from design-time support in Visual Studio and Expression Blend, all using your choice of programming languages.
One area of continual investment for the engineering team that spans across all these areas in both XAML and HTML/JavaScript is performance: we’ve put a lot of effort into this in Windows 8, making it easier than ever for you to build fast and fluid Metro style apps. In the graphics area in particular, we’ve continued to improve rendering and composition performance, worked to use GPU hardware wherever possible, and even made it so that common types of animations run independently off the UI thread to ensure they remain smooth regardless of any work your app is doing on the CPU. We’ve worked toward ensuring that everything the UI frameworks do, they do well — fast, fluid, and with lower power requirements. When using a UI framework, you’re already using the power of DirectX behind the scenes; in many cases this provides everything you need to achieve great graphics performance.
DirectX in Windows 8
Still, there are definitely times when you need the raw immediate-mode rendering performance and direct access to graphics devices that DirectX provides. Starting with Windows 8, DirectX SDK components are now included as part of the primary Windows SDK, and DirectX contains a host of new features such as a unified 3D API, improved 2D graphics and text performance with Direct2D, a rich image processing pipeline, and improved printing support.
Read more: Windows 8 app developer blog
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