What about WPF???

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is Microsoft’s new(ish) wiz bang GUI platform, simultaneously providing a potential replacement for Winforms, GDI+, Adobe Flash (Silverlight), and much more. With the release of Visual Studio 2008, a fully integrated WPF forms editor was finally introduced, making it a viable choice for GUI development. Some might argue that it was viable before the release VS 2008, but without that beautiful forms editor, I would beg to differ. Much deserved attention has been lavished on WPF recently, but in my opinion it is still incomplete and immature in comparison to Winforms (which Microsoft plans to support and actively develop for some time). However, many people are indeed migrating to WPF, so for them has this article been in vain? Nope!!

The funny thing about WPF is that unlike previous incarnations of Microsoft GUI APIs, controls are no longer actually windows! Luckily, Microsoft has left in a backdoor for those of us that need a HWND to get anything useful done. HwndHost is a WPF control that actually exposes an HWND. An HwndHost (or its derived class WindowsFormsHost) can be placed into a form, from which we can attain our much needed HWND, and everything should just work as it did before.

Conclusion

With a little effort, drawing your D3D scene into a control of a .NET application can be quite straightforward. Adding the advanced GUI capabilities of Winforms or WPF to your rendering application can be enormously beneficial, be it a game engine, a scientific visualization, or even a simple graphics technique demo (with all their wonderful adjustable parameters).