MSDN Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 72)

Declan Brennan Silverlight Building Advanced 3D Animations With Silverlight 2.0 f, by some incredible mischance, all the publicity in the past few months about Silverlight™ has passed you by, let me bring you up to date: Silverlight is a new cross-browser plug-in from Microsoft that brings the power of the Microsoft® .NET Framework to bear on an area that was previously reserved for Flash or Java Applets. Silverlight has a wealth of useful features out of the box. It supports a lean-and-mean version of the .NET Framework 3.5 that includes, among other things, XML and Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), generic collections, Web services, and LINQ. Silverlight also supports a range of .NET-compliant languages, but here I’ll be sticking to C#. I think the best way to come to grips with a new technology is to have a little fun with it. So when the Silverlight 1.1 alpha was released and I saw the exciting presentation by Tim Sneath at the IMT conference in Dublin, I decided to throw together a little educational application demonstrating how various 3D shapes (called polyhedra) can be assembled by folding a flat template. Silverlight doesn’t support 3D by default, so this involved building an emulation of the DirectX® math libraries to do the 3D stuff. A polyhedron is a three-dimensional object with flat faces. This Silverlight sample explores those regular and semi-regular polyhedra called the Platonic and Archimedian polyhedra. The faces of these polyhedra are all regular polygons—their sides are all the same length—such as equilateral triangles or squares. They are also 72 msdnmagazine convex, meaning they have no pieces that stick out. As you might guess from the ancient Greek names, these objects have fascinated humanity for a long time. If you’re interested, you can find out a lot more about them on George Hart’s Web site: georgehart.com/ virtual-polyhedra/vp.html. You can see a demo of the finished application in Figure 1 or at This article is based on a prerelease version of Silverlight 2.0. All information herein is subject to change. This article uses the following technologies: Silverlight This article discusses: XAML basics ✥ Building elements in XAML ✥ How to fold a polyhedron ✥ Emulating DirectX math ✥ Code download available at: msdn2.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911 Declan Brennan is old enough to remember the first microprocessor, and he still hasn’t gotten used to having his own personal genie in a bottle. He can’t believe his luck at being in a world limited not by technology but only by imagination. Learn more about Declan at declan.brennan.name. http://georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/vp.html http://georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/vp.html http://msdn2.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911 http://declan.brennan.name

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - April 2008

MSDN Magazine - April 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Foundations Test Run Service Station Windows with C++ Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - April 2008

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