3D Acceleration and WPF development
Posted: 18. Jul 2009, 13:35
I recently decided to move my development machines to VM, to stop the clutter on my host, which i try to keep clean as a games machine.
My setup:
Host: Vista 64,
Guests: Vista 32 and XP 32.
With VirtualBox's release of 3D acceleration, i figured i could finally get over some of the problems that i had encountered while trying to developing application that needed to interface into DirectX on Virtual PC 2007.
So far so good, but one caveat has to be taken into account.
Enabling 3D Acceleration nerfs WPF development on the guest (VS 2008, .NET 3.5).
Creating a new WPF application doesn't render any controls in the design window. It also causes an <Exception in HRESULT: 0x88980406> of that control (i was trying to edit a Grid). It results in you not even being able to edit the properties of the control.
I've done some investigation and found this on the VMWare forum:
<Quote>
OK. We've reproduced this internally and have a fix we plan to make available in the next Fusion 2.0 release.
The problem was that WPF apps (along with iTunes and a few other programs) combine 2D and 3D rendering in the same window. When 3D was enabled, Fusion's SVGA driver had an issue where the 2D and 3D rendering would both try to update the same area of the guest framebuffer at the same time, causing the rendering issues you described.
Sorry for the inconvenience, and stay tuned for this and lots of other fixes.
</Quote>
I'm not sure if VirtualBox's problem is related, but disabling 3D acceleration for the guest fixes the problem, but obviously you won't be able to combine WPF and 3D applications together at the moment.
Anyway, hopefully someone finds this info useful. I had almost given up trying to develop on a VirtualBox guest.
My setup:
Host: Vista 64,
Guests: Vista 32 and XP 32.
With VirtualBox's release of 3D acceleration, i figured i could finally get over some of the problems that i had encountered while trying to developing application that needed to interface into DirectX on Virtual PC 2007.
So far so good, but one caveat has to be taken into account.
Enabling 3D Acceleration nerfs WPF development on the guest (VS 2008, .NET 3.5).
Creating a new WPF application doesn't render any controls in the design window. It also causes an <Exception in HRESULT: 0x88980406> of that control (i was trying to edit a Grid). It results in you not even being able to edit the properties of the control.
I've done some investigation and found this on the VMWare forum:
<Quote>
OK. We've reproduced this internally and have a fix we plan to make available in the next Fusion 2.0 release.
The problem was that WPF apps (along with iTunes and a few other programs) combine 2D and 3D rendering in the same window. When 3D was enabled, Fusion's SVGA driver had an issue where the 2D and 3D rendering would both try to update the same area of the guest framebuffer at the same time, causing the rendering issues you described.
Sorry for the inconvenience, and stay tuned for this and lots of other fixes.
</Quote>
I'm not sure if VirtualBox's problem is related, but disabling 3D acceleration for the guest fixes the problem, but obviously you won't be able to combine WPF and 3D applications together at the moment.
Anyway, hopefully someone finds this info useful. I had almost given up trying to develop on a VirtualBox guest.