Win2D VS Interactive Data Display for WPF

For Windows only, Win2D!

You're looking for Win2D: https://github.com/microsoft/Win2D. It's the official D2D WinRT wrapper, supports UWP and WinUI, has seamless interior with XAML, it's very easy to use and has extensive interop APIs (even more so once we ship the next release) that give you maximum control if needed. I recommend checking it out 🙂

Your easiest bet is likely to use Win2D within UWP or WinUI 3, then you could just throw a CanvasControl as the root of your UI and draw whatever you want on it, including setting individual pixels. Alternatively an easy way to do that could be to use a WriteableBitmap in WPF/UWP/WinUI 3 just drawn into a root Border or something, and then you can easily manipulate pixels there. Of course, that'd be slower and not CPU accelerated, but still viable depending on your exact use case.

Alternatively you can also try Win2D, which is an official wrapper for D2D available for UWP and WinUI. You could use its CanvasAnimatedControl panel and then do your drawing from there, and just manually draw all your particles. The actual drawing would still be GPU accelerated, so it'd be relatively efficient (though less than using a custom shader, as you'd be queueing each particle from the CPU side).

To make a long story short, it's a UWP app since I've used DirectX 11 for drawing on the screen. I use C#, and I needed win2d (https://github.com/microsoft/Win2D)

Universal Windows Platform was introduced as the new hotness, but in my personal experience lacks a number of features from WPF I couldn't part with. It seems to have flopped a bit outside of applications developed by Microsoft. Projects that I though would bring features I really wanted (like win2d: GitHub - microsoft/Win2D) seem to have lost support. I'd hold off on this.

A short story / cautionary tale of the last time I had to add a chart to an old application: I had a project that needed to make use of Microsoft's Interactive Data Display [formerly Dynamic Data Display or 'D3']. I don't recall what feature it was that was specifically being asked for, but D3 did it and was the only real option outside of springing for one of those massive/pricey component libraries. If you want to talk about how silly it is to create an entire separate process to wedge a WPF control into a WinForms app as a MDI child, that communicated via pipes, I've got notes. In short: the tech may be dated, but I always welcome more WinForms controls.