I'm using VS 2010 on Windows Server 2003, running on a Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop. VS 2010 runs fine, except for persistent and random screen re-drawing issues. Samples of these are here.
These artifacts occur as the mouse moves over items that highlight on a mouse-over event, while scrolling, and when switching tabs. VS 2008 has non of these issues, so I assume that it is related to VS 2010's use of WPF. Could it be that my video card or driver is not up to the task of rendering WPF? Some other WPF applications (not Silverlight) also have some of these screen repainting problems.
I have tried a variety of settings in System Properties-->Advanced-->Performance Options-->Visual Effects, and in the related "Advanced" tab, Processor Scheduling is adjusted for best performance of programs.
Many thanks for any suggestions!
This has been answered for a while but I just fixed a similar issue with screen artifacting I was receiving in editor views of a MVC3 application. I'm running on a Core i7 3960X 6 core processor, the graphics card is a Radeon HD 6950 2GB. Needless to say, I shouldn't be getting these issues. It looked to be something related to my graphics card because going to Tools > Options and then unselecting "Use hardware graphics acceleration if available" caused the issue to stop occurring -
Visual Studio uses WPF which used the video card alot more than traditional GDI applications, I'd check your card drivers and make sure they're up to date.
Related
I'm experiencing a GUI freeze problem, related to hard vs. software UI rendering.
The context : 2 WPF apps (.NET 3.5 SP1) running on a dual-display XP Embedded machine (DirectX 9.0c).
At some point, one of these app freezes. But only the rendering : the GUI stays active (message pump is active, the application is responsive), but the rendering is not done.
The freeze can last seconds or forever.
The 2nd app keeps running normally. The bug occurs only in a dual-display configuration, the 2nd app being a kind of catalyst (more memory and CPU usage...)
Using Perforator, I see that Video Memory Usage is continuously going up & down in spikes (cf : screenshot).
During that time, one native thread is consuming 100% of a CPU (the stack-trace involves WPFgfx, DirectX, GDI, and video driver)
Usually, when the app unfreeze, it's fully software rendered (purple tint with Perforator).
Also, de-activating hardware rendering unfreeze the app.
My conclusion, so far, is that I'm facing an out of video memory (as described at point #14 in this post), with an attempt to fallback to software rendering, but there is a loop somewhere trying again in hardware mode.
Am i right ?
Would it be more a WPF problem, or a video driver problem ? or even DirectX ?
Are there some parameters I can tune around this ?
Am i right ? Would it be more a WPF problem, or a video driver problem ? or even DirectX ? Are there some parameters I can tune around this ?
This sounds like a driver issue. I would start with seeing if there are driver updates. The best option might just be to disable hardware acceleration altogether, as WPF (on XP especially) really relies on the graphics drivers.
Visual Studio 2010 sp1 disabled hardware acceleration for itself on XP for exactly this reason...
Visual Studio 2010 moved to using WPF for rendering the editor. This is leading to slowdowns while I am editing code, especially if I'm running something else that uses other video capabilities.
How can I speed this up? A new video card? New drivers? Settings?
What technologies does WPF use to render and what video card would complement it?
WPF uses DirectX for rendering, so a new top of the line video card would certainly help you out here. Any solid ATI or Nvidia card nowadays supports the latest and greatest DirectX.
The answer from #Charlie is absolutely spot on; and I thought about saying this on a comment but then figured I should put it as an answer.
Under certain circumstances (certainly on my desktop at work, which uses a workstation NVidia card), which are listed in the installation issues (connected with Hyper-V in particular), VS2010 fails to enable video acceleration even if it is available.
Open up Tools->Options, and on the very first options panel you'll see a group in the middle 'Visual Experience'. Just make sure that everything is checked in there and that it says 'Visual Studio is currently using hardware-accelerated rendering...'.
I don't think the hardware requirements for VS2010 are particularly heavy - but your card certainly must be DX capable.
I'm maintaing a Windows Forms application which draws map data with overlays. I've been considering a move to WPF for the drawing layer, to take advantage of the graphics card rendering. In the last couple of weeks, however, I've started to have some doubts:
The new release of Evernote uses WPF, and doesn't run on Nvidia Quadro cards.
A WPF transitions demo from WindowsClient.net stopped rendering part-way through the animations on one of our test portables with Intel graphics (and yes, we had the latest Intel drivers).
Stack Overflow questions like this.
With the current Windows Forms codebase I can expect the application to run identically at every installation. WPF is much more dependent on the quality of the graphics card drivers, and I don't have the testing resources for comprehensive coverage.
I'm particularly interested to hear from people who've delivered a WPF application outside their own company or to a mixed population of machines - did hardware and driver specific bugs cause you a significant support burden?
We are facing some issues with the drivers of a specific graphic card vendor. Blue screens, a diagonal pixel displacement and application crashes have been observed. It is possible, however, to turn off the Hardware Acceleration on a per-application basis. Sad but true, this is the current workaround.
As already stated, I hope that the VS2010 release will help to improve the stability. Perhaps one day we'll see lists of WPF related fixes in the release notes of graphic card drivers. Along with the latest fixes for the game engine XYZ.
Our WPF application is running on Windows XP SP2 (minimum) and is ok apart from on some machines, if the application is running and the PC goes into screensave mode it blue screens and crashes the machine. This seems to be graphics card driver version related - some of our users run dual monitors.
We haven't cracked this issue yet.
WPF uses Direct3D for its rendering, falling over to software if necessary. My best guess is that some drivers say that they support something in hardware but really don't handle it properly, and that is when we see these incompatibility issues.
The answer to your question depends on how willing you are to have less compatibility with machines than your current codebase has. If you've ever visited support forums for PC games you see all sorts of threads about graphics problems. As most PC's are going to be more and more compatible with Vista/Win7 and therefore support D3D9/10, the issues should lessen. The real question is if the tradeoff for you is worth it.
My own experience deploying a WPF app, I had issues with the mediaelement not working the same on two very similar PC's. But the video subsystem is a different can of worms anyway. Otherwise it was fine but I wasn't doing anything special graphically, just standard xaml.
I'm considering switching from MFC to WPF.
My first concern is that there are too many users who don't have .NET with WPF installed yet. Can anybody point to a source containing the WPF penetration numbers?
My second concern is speed.
Any other considerations?
I've been banging away at WPF for a while now. It is brilliant, but it still has (occasional) holes you've to plug yourself. However all indications are .NET 4.0 will be a significant step forward.
I would say start now. The WPF learning curve is REALLY steep, and it'll be a while before you'll be releasing software to users, believe me. Also do yourself a favour and get the WPF Unleashed book. It's superior.
Speed isn't a consideration. The power WPF gives is well worth any drawbacks with speed, which - coming from Windows Forms - I haven't noticed to be honest.
What kind of application are you developing? If it's a wide-distribution desktop app that you want your grandmother to install, your concern about .NET 3.0/3.5 adoption is valid. So far from what I've seen, performance is less of a concern.
WPF penetration
First of all, Windows Vista and Windows 7 both have WPF preinstalled, which accounts for 35% of the market automatically. Windows XP has had it as it had .NET Framework 3.0 as an option in Windows Update for over three years, and many applications ship with it, so it is likely to also be installed on a high percentage of Windows XP machines. StatOwl indicates that about 80% of NET Framework installations are version 3 or above.
If you're shipping on CD it is no big deal to include the latest .NET Framework on the CD and have it install automatically. If users are downloading your application, it can contact Microsoft's web server to download and install the latest .NET Framework. Online ClickOnce deployment also has this capability if you want people to be able to start their application directly from the web browser without installing it.
So the bottom line is, you probably don't need to worry about whether people will have WPF installed on their machines or not unless your target market consists primarily of dial up customers on Windows XP who don't run much third-party software (i.e., they just run Windows and your application).
Speed
Not an issue. I have a 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 384 MB RAM from 1998 that I test my software on, and my WPF applications have comparable performance with equivalent MFC applications. If your WPF application uses lots of fancy graphics and animation it will run slowly on ancient CPUs and graphics cards, but so would an ordinary MFC application with the same features.
Don't even bother trying to use WPF if you are sticking with Visual Studio 2008 for the next year or two. The experience will be way too painful. I'm talking about "my IDE crashed again" type of pain.
If you are going to use VS 2010 in the near future, then WPF is a blast. Download the beta, a couple of themes off CodePlex, are start playing. Once you get past the (freaking huge) learning curve I think you will find it to be quite enjoyable.
IMHO, you should wait for Visual Studio 2010 and WPF 4.0 to make the actual migration. They will close some very annoying gaps in the product.
Meanwhile, you can try it out. In terms of coding/readability -- it's going to be WAAAY better than with MFC =)
As for the performance and platform -- it shouldn't be a problem unless you have any very special circumstances (like if you can't require users to install .NET).
Also see this related question on switching to WPF from Windows Forms.
If you are thinking about a larger, modular, appliation I recommend checking out Prism. It's a bit of a beast itself, but you should be able to tackle it after coming to grips with C#, Dependency Properties and XAML. Plus, learning Prism gave me a much better understanding of WPF/Silverlight, at least from the development/binding side.
Mike Taulty posted an excellent 10 part video series on Prism. It's a great way to get your head around the platform.
I'd also recommend the pages linked to from the Getting Started page on codeplex. After all that, you're probably ready to tackle the Reference Implementation which comes with the download.
A previous answer of mine might also help clear up any remaining confusion around Controllers/Presenters in the framework that you might have (I did).
Kevin Hoffman this morning reports that:
When put under a virtual machine
running Windows 7, VS2010 fails to
render things, borders disappear,
windows become unusable and the
experience is downright awful. On the
other hand, when you run VS2010 "bare
metal" with no virtualization between
it and your video card, everything is
beautiful and all works well.
What about a virtual machine would cause VS2010's WPF to render poorly?
WPF renders stuff on a Direct3D surface. It's able to take advantage of hardware acceleration features provided by graphics cards to improve performance. Under VMs, these features might be unavailable.
I haven't tried VS2010 specifically yet, but you may be hitting a known issue with WPF apps in VMs. Try disabling hardware acceleration as described here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970912.aspx
Our custom WPF app running on a VM had similar performance problems, and that fixed it for us.
As Mehrdad says, Virtual Machines don't really virtualize 3D hardware (there is some work being done in this area by VMWare, but it's only older versions of DirectX I think) and WPF utilizes the GPU to render more efficiently, thus it has to use software to render in a virtual machine and that is significantly slower.
If you have a multi-core machine, and you're using a Virtual Machine manager that supports giving VM's multiple cores, then you might consider adding more cores to the VM to better utilize CPU resources, or use Kevin's Registry changes.
VS2010 isn't a finished product and it ties in quite heavily with various elements of the system's native GUI interfaces (which, in Windows 7, also not a finished product, these are not fully cultivated). It's not entirely surprising that two betas running in a virtualised environment would have issues. As stated, this is liable to be an Aero issue, which ties in heavily with DirectX's hardware rendering. These issues might not occur under classic assuming Win7 has that.
I'm using Windows 7 + VS 2010 + WPF and everything is fine, however I'm using VMWare Fusion with hardware acceleration on.