The past few weeks have been really frustrating for me in a lot of ways, mainly because I have had a need to learn and understand HLSL for the purpose of creating effects for not only WPF but also for use with XNA.
So I hit the trail of trying to understand all that I can about HLSL and Effects in general, and to be honest, the whole subject is a bit like reading a book that you can never get past the first 10 pages without falling asleep… it just goes on and on and on… never really getting to the point.
So I thought I would post a few links with some excellent book marks I now have so if you decide to head down this road of understanding, hopefully you can get to your destination a little bit quicker.
The first link is:
http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home.html
Have a look through this awesome resource, and especially the Content Authoring section where you can download the amazing FX Composer 2.5
Also check out their free Shader library:
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/shaderlibrary/webpages/shader_library.html
Some great videos on that site as well.
Next is:
http://www.codeplex.com/GraphiXNA
Some awesome results coming out of this project with plenty of support for standard effects required in many applications.
You should also check out Greg Schechter blog for a great intro to writing effects:
http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/archive/2008/05/12/introduction-to-writing-effects.aspx
Walt Ritscher was also kind enough to compile this list of links for me as well:
The DirectX SDK has some useful pages.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb509638%28VS.85%29.aspx
Other links
http://www.fairyengine.com/articles/hlsl2sided.htm
http://tinyurl.com/6y8qab
WPF specific links
http://tinyurl.com/6jfmkc
http://tinyurl.com/6pzytf
Thanks for that Walt!
So there is enough reading and playing with all those links to keep you awake for around a month… trust me on that ;-)
If you have some great resources you would like to add to the list, please email them through to me.