Win2D VS lambda-converters

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.

Yeah, I think some things go a bit too far. I also think they tried too hard to solve certain things (poorly) in XAML that frankly shouldn't be declarative. There's a few things you can do to make WPF less painful. I recommend using https://github.com/michael-damatov/lambda-converters, for example, rather than writing whole-blown converter classes of your own.

something like https://github.com/michael-damatov/lambda-converters should be built in because writing a whole-ass class is inexplicably verbose for 95% of things people do with converters

instead of full-blown converters in C#, let me write inline lambdas right in the XAML. Blazor lets me do that, sort of. (I use https://github.com/michael-damatov/lambda-converters so I at least don't have to write entire types.)

I haven’t dived too deep into MVU either, but at a glance, it seems more focused on lambdas. IMHO, one of the weak spots in MVVM/XAML is how much boilerplate you have to write for a converter, when oftentimes just a lambda would do. This lib helps, but it still isn’t inline with the rest of the UI.