Last week we held our chat on Direct X. Our experts included Tom Miller (he can type fast, ....really really fast), Kang Su Gatlin (whatever happened to C++ questions), David Weller, Rick Hoskinson(another “guy” from Tom's team - Software Engineer) and two of our .NET Specialist's Adam Gallant and Anthony Vranic. I finally got around to “cleaning up” the transctipt and posting it to the web
We answered some 80+ hard core questions. Here is a few sample ones:
Q: Does Avalon's native 2D and vector drawing make a suitable replacement for the new obsolete DirectDraw? Or more to the point, when can we expect to see hardware accelerated 2D drawing?
A: It's definitely a replacement for vector graphics development. But Avalon and DX are two different styles of writing to the (generally) same graphics engine. One is focused on user-facing content and interaction, the other is focused on "down in the pipe" programming (retail games, etc.). I will publish a book this year on how to write games in Avalon as well...maybe that will help :)
Q: are there plans for (managed) DirectX sessions for this year's pdc?
A: In my opinion, that's a great suggestion. I will pass it along to the Manager and Technical Content owner for this year's PDC, who work with me just down the hall :)
For the rest of the questions you will have to visit the transcript page :-) http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/canada/chats/transcripts/2005_1_13.aspx
Any feedback? Which other web casts / chats would you like to see from MSDN Canada? Please let me know.