SharpDX Next: WP8.1, SIMD, DX12...

Hi All!

We have seen recently lots of exciting news coming from for C#, .NET and DirectX. SharpDX is going to try to keep up with all of this and this post is explaining what's on the roadmap.

First of all, as you probably know, there are three major fix/new features for .NET and DirectX that will have most likely an impact for SharpDX:

• DllImport available on Windows Phone 8.1

Until now, we had to use a laborious bridge between .NET and native code in order to get access to DirectX on WP8. With Windows Phone 8.1, we should be able to provide pure AnyCPU assemblies for WP8.1. That will simplify a lot our build system as we had to keep a separate special build for WP8 in order to build SharpDX in x86 and ARM. We are just going to start to work on WP8.1 SharpDX migration.

• New SIMD feature available with latest RyuJit

This was a high request from us, and it is great to see it coming. While the SIMD feature is still in a very alpha stage, only available on an alpha JIT and Windows 8, we will keep an eye on this and as soon as we have a broader set of platforms supported we will try to move to it. Current maths code in SharpDX is not deeply spread all other the code but we will have to study how to integrate SIMD in SharpDX, or to simplify its integration and avoid redundancy with part of our math library.

• DirectX12

We are still in negotiation with Microsoft to get an early access to start development of a managed wrapper for DX12 that could be available for day-one official release of DirectX12 for developers supposedly later this year.

We have also lots of things done/planned for the upcoming SharpDX 2.6 release:

• Embrace nuget to deploy SharpDX to all platforms/framework: This is not easy, as SharpDX is coming into different form, depending on several OS platforms (Desktop+DirectX11, Desktop+DirectX11.2, WinRT+DirectX11.2, WP8+DirectX11) * several .NET platforms (2.0/4.0)
• Audio support in the Toolkit thanks to the contribution of developers on our github repository.
• Loads of bugfixes, small and new features accessible from latest version (DirectX11.2...etc.)

Also, in order to simplify our build and the maintenance burden, we are planning to abandon support for 2.0/3.5 .NET framework.We don't know yet if it will be effective for 2.6 or later, but if you have any issue with this, please tell us.

All of this is keeping us busy, considering that we have also several other spare time projects to develop, but we will try to keep you updated with SharpDX!

Best regards,
xoofx