Oops...

Thanks to those of you who pointed out the deliberate mistake (okay, booboo) on our Downloads page - it works again now and we apologise for the glitch.

We'd tell you what caused it but we're too embarrassed.....

Another new build....

Hallooo - ahead of a bit of a push for testers, we've put up a new build with some cosmetic changes and the squishing of one or two tiresome buglets.

The "die" date on this version is Jan 2nd 2010, and as always there'll new version up there well before then.

Keep your comments coming in - interestingly your feedback to date's going to take Vixer in a direction we hadn't originally anticipated, so please don't feel your input isn't valued....

WPF and Direct2D

Seems to us to be the most obvious thing in the world to want to hit Direct2D from WPF but there's a severe scarcity of doc about how to do it.

We spent many happy hours hosting a C++ HWND in a WPF app and pinging messages to it, but then we stumbled on Mahmoud's piece about the Windows API Code Pack and our lives changed for the better.

In case you're interested, WPF has a retained mode model, so if you draw something it remembers what you drew for you, so when the window's repainted or resized it knows how to redraw. All of which is fine, but there are circumstances where you want immediate-mode graphics, so you own the display list and take ownership of the drawing.

Why might that be? Well, if your display list (i.e. the list of stuff you want to draw) is coming from somewhere else - a CAD system maybe, or a database - you don't want to keep it twice, and if it's hundreds of thousands of elements you're trying to do something WPF wasn't designed for. Direct2D, on the other hand, most definitely was.

But why do us Vixerer's care? Suffice to say Vixer's going to have a little sister sometime soon....

Yip, still alive...

Halloo - well all sorts of stuff's been going on to keep us busy. At a dull technical level the very astute amongst you might have noticed we've moved to a new hoster for our sites, but more importantly wearing our PollyTiles hats we've been engrossed in making the world's biggest jigsaw.

At a mere 1.2 million pieces it's a monster, and it's actually the second world record we've been involved in!

On the Vixer front, we're adding some new goodies, more of which very soon.....

Another New Free Version of Vixer?

Incredible, indeed. A new version crept onto the www yesterday with an expiry date in November, so we'd suggest you replace your current version with this one.

Your projects will still work - nothing at that low level needed to be changed, and if it did we'd have made sure your work was safe.

So.. download it, play with it, create superb videos, become internationally recognised and ludicrously wealthy, and... ah... drop us a note about it...

Windows 7 XP Mode - Very Cool Indeed

It's been a while since I needed to use Virtual Machines - they used to be a big part of my life, and suddenly they are again. I really feel the need to congratulate the Windows team on the new Virtual PC and XP Mode options in Windows 7 - what a truly superb job they've done.

One minor gotcha was trying to read an existing VM though - to enable the integration capabilities (so your VM can see the host machine and the internet), the VM starts asking for device drivers for USB (this being some of the clever stuff the new version has added). Where are those going to come from? Your Windows XP disc of course. How are you going to read that without the integration capabilities working? You ain't.

Unless someone knows better? Holler if you do...

Skype impact on ASP.NET!!!!

Moving to Windows 7, a couple of weird things happened, so (just in case you see them too) it turns out that the new Skype client (4.1) listens to http on port 80, as an alternative to its default port, and that's enough to prevent ASP.NET debugging your dev site. It's the kind of interaction between applications you'd never look for, and I'm hugely indebted to Martin Kulov - if you see the not terribly helpful "server committed a protocol violation" message, there's a very real chance if you kill the switch in Skype that lets it listen on 80 all will be well.

Also I suddenly discover I need to enable Windows authentication for VS2008-generated web sites - not sure whether that's fall out from the move to Windows 7 or not...