Direct3D12 for .NET

SharpDX 3.0.0 (alpha01)

This is the first alpha release of the 3.0.0 branch bringing some major new features and changes:

• Add support for Direct3D12 to get the best of your graphics card (only compatible with Windows 10 10041)
• Thanks to the work from the diet branch, SharpDX main assembly is a bit more lightweight.
• We have simplified the distribution and packaging by supporting only 2 platforms and .NET versions:
  • Desktop with .NET 4.5
  • StoreApp with PCL .NET 4.5 valid for Windows 8.1+ and Windows Phone 8.1+ development
• All Mathematics (Vector3, Vector4...) have been moved to a dedicated assembly. The reason behind this change is to put SharpDX on a diet, where higher level API (like Paradox, MonoGame...) are no longer forced to include this API. In order to support this, all SharpDX assemblies are now using interop types (RawVector3, RawVector4 from SharpDX.Mathematics.Interop namespace)
• A new assembly SharpDX.Desktop that contains RenderForm, RenderLoop previously in SharpDX assembly

Assemblies are both available from a zip (Latest dev package from the home page of http://sharpdx.org ) and from NuGet.
Note that distribution from NuGet should be now more stable and usable than previous versions due to the diet work.

We have also clean-up the API:

• The DirectX June 2010 SDK is no longer supported. For example, methods like DX11 are no longer supported (e.g. Texture.FromFile...)
• Direct3D10 API has been removed
• The Toolkit is no longer supported and distributed
• Direct3D9, DirectSound, DirectInput, RawInput have been frozen so that the code generated from SharpGen codegen from C++ is no longer running. It means that these APIs will no longer receive major changes and should be considered as deprecated.

Projects that are still requiring to use .NET 2.0 or .NET 4.0, or API like Direct3D10 will have to continue using SharpDX 2.6.3.

Building from the sources

In order to compile SharpDX from the sources, It requires to install the Windows SDK for Windows 10

How to use the samples

The samples are now part of a submodule of the SharpDX repository. In order to use the sample, you can download the SharpDX zip binaries and unzip the Bin directory so that it is at the same level than the Samples directory:

• Bin\DesktopApp\SharpDX.dll...etc.
• Samples\Desktop\...... etc.

Some scripts will be added later to simplify the setup of the samples.

About Direct3D12

This release includes a preview of the Direct3D12 API along a very basic sample HelloWorld available from the SharpDX Samples repository.

Compare to previous Direct3D API in SharpDX, the API is now closer to the C++ API (e.g keep methods like Device.CreateXXX(...) instead of new XXX(device, ...))

In order to use this API, make sure that you have Windows 10 10041 and the latest graphics drivers installed

Due to NDA, I'm not yet allowed to publish ported samples from Direct3D12 Early Access Program, sorry for that!

Known issues

• The Direct3D12 API is still a work in progress. Some structures are not yet usable or not correctly marshalled. Most of the work done so far was to get the HelloTriangle working, which is using a very small part of the Direct3D12 API.
• XInput 1.4 and XAudio2 2.8 are only generated for the Windows 8 versions (for both desktop and stores). We will restore previous versions in a later alpha release (XInput 9.1.0, XAudio 2.7)

Feedback

As this is a major release, if you have any questions or remarks concerning this release, join the discussion on github: Feedback from 3.0.0 alpha01

Best,
xoofx