Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Real-time Direct2D Graph for WPF

Righthand's blog - Realtime graph for WPF

"You know the Task Manager’s CPU Usage History graph that shows CPU utilization over time? Try that type of the graph in WPF and you’ll realize that it isn’t as easy as it should be due to the WPF’s performance for real time graphs. Which sucks due to the way WPF works. Even with 3rd party you’ll have hard time to find a graph fast enough to cope with even more than few hundred samples.

Hence I’ve decide to build my own real time graph. It is based on Direct2D because Direct2D is much faster when it comes to presenting the graphical result. However, merging Direct2D into WPF is, again, not an easy task as it should be (hint to MS – there should be native WPF support for hosting Direct2D output). Anyway, I found the article Using Direct2D with WPF on CodePlex. It comes with sources which I use. Those sources require Windows API CodePack(WACP), a bug ridden set of managed API’s to various, otherwise unsupported, features (MS went with this approach (if it works, it works, if it doesn’t fix it by yourself) instead of providing an official support). The WACP binaries I provide are compiled from 1.1. sources with some bug fixed regarding DirectCompute.

Here is a snapshot from a graph showing a sinusoide as a product of many samples (the attached example contains required code and binaries).

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image..."

Every blue moon I need a graph control like this and can never seem to remember where I found the last one... Hopefully in highlighting it here I'll be able to find it easier in the future. :)

That and I thought it cool that; a) It uses Direct2D and b) the source is available.

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