Develop Reference

SharpDX WARP - minimal code to get a drawable surface

I asked another question about generating high quality graphics in a service on Windows Server and SharpDX looks like a reasonable possibility. However I am finding it difficult to find current how-to style documentation. I am specifically interested in the WARP device context.
My use-case is for generation of png format images, and steps of interest are initialisation, loading existing images, drawing graphics and text on them, a resizing / scaling, and saving to png format. I mention this as a large part of the potential use cases for SharpDX are game-related and focus on buffer chains and rendering to forms, which I do not need to do.
This is question 1 then - what is the minimal C# code required to create a drawable 2D surface using WARP in SharpDx in preparation for the above use case.
Other code I have found via Google is either game-focussed, not using WARP, or is simply too complex as it covers more basis.

Fast pixel drawing in WPF

I would like to write a simple ray tracer using WPF. It is a learning project and thus I favour configurability over performance (otherwise I'd go for C++).
I still want relatively fast pixel drawing. A previous question on StackOverflow contains code to achieve this in WPF, by obtaining a GDI bitmap. From the relatively little I know about Windows programming,
GDI is slow
DirectX is fast
WPF uses DirectX underneath (not sure which parts of WPF though)
Is it possible to obtain pixel-level access using DirectX (not GDI) through the WPF Canvas (or similar)?
I will also consider suggestions for incorporating DirectX API calls within a WPF window (alongside other WPF controls) if that is possible.
Thanks in advance.

Interesting, but with raytracing, writing the pixels to the screen will (should) not be the slow part. You can use WriteableBitmap for the purpose, though. It's certainly quick enough for what you want.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.imaging.writeablebitmap.aspx
(For info, I use it in this emu/IDE - http://0x10c-devkit.com/ - and it can refresh a low res display with great performance. There's the source to that on the github repository, the LEM1802 plugin.)
Ah, this bit: https://github.com/kierenj/0x10c-DevKit/blob/master/PluginAPI/NyaElektriska.LEM1802/GPU.cs - see UpdateDisplay.

Another solution is WriteableBitmapEx. It extends the builtin WriteableBitmap.

There is an open Source Project Called Direct Canvas wich is A hardware accelerated, 2D drawing API that supports vector graphics, multimedia files, extensible pixel shaders, blending modes and more!
http://directcanvas.codeplex.com/
Demo http://www.youtube.com/user/jdollah69#p/u

Native WPF vs. Custom DirectX for displaying large images

I need to speed up my image viewer, and wondering if I should be looking into creating my own DirectX control to do so.
My image viewer displays medical images. They can be pretty large. We're talking 55mb when it comes to mammography. The pixel data is 16bit greyscale stored in a ushort array. Without getting into the gory details, my current approach is loading the pixel data into an ImageSource, and using the WPF Image control.
I've never done anything with DirectX. Is it worth diving into it? Would it be any faster than the native WPF stuff? If so how significantly? Or, should I just forget about DirectX and look into areas where I can improve my current approach?
Before somebody says so, I know WPF utilize DirectX. I'm wondering If removing the WPF layer and writing the DirectX myself will improve performance.

I have some experience drawing multi-gigabyte satellite and chart imagery. Working with imagery around 55MB should probably work okay even without trying to optimize it too much. You haven't really given enough detail to recommend one alternative over the other, so I will give my opinion on the pros and cons.
Using 2D windows APIs will be the simplest to implement and should always be fast enough if you don't need to rotate and simply want to display an image and zoom and pan around. If you treat it as one large image the performance will not be as good when you zoom out if you are drawing with halftoning to give a nice smooth image. This is because it will effectively have to read all 55mb of image every time it draws.
To get around this performance issue you can make multiple bitmaps, effectively mip-mapping your image. As you zoom out you can pick the reduced resolution image closest to the resolution you are trying to draw . If you are not familiar with mip-mapping here is a Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap
Implementing it with DirectX will be 10x as difficult. Different graphics hardware has different maximum texture sizes. Most likely you will need to break your image up in to multiple textures to draw and you will also have to keep track of render states, viewing matrices, etc.
However, if you do use DirectX, you can implement lots of real-time photo adjustments You can do real-time rotation by simply adjusting view matrices. You can do real-time contrast, brightness, gamma, and sharpness easily in a pixel shader.
There are two other API's I might suggest. If you are willing to limit yourself to Vista or later then Direct2D would be a little simpler than Direct3D. Also if you ever will need to implement it on a non-windows platform I would suggest using OpenGL instead. My current project is in Direct3D because a few years ago when we started it OpenGL was falling behind and I didn't forsee the popularity of Android devices. I now wish we had used OpenGL instead.

Try profiling to see where WPF is spending its time. Are you displaying the images at their native resolution? If not it might be worthwhile to do some preprocessing and create 1/2 resolution versions.

How do you change the color of an Image in WPF?

I have a .png image that's just white-on-transparent, and I'm wondering if there's an easy way to make that green-on-transparent, red-on-transparent, etc so I don't need to make separate .png files for each color.

Take a look at these CodeProject Articles
Image Processing Lab
ImageMagic-WPF Image Color Spaces
Image Processing Lab is a simple tool for image processing, which
includes different filters and tools to analyze images available in
the AForge.NET framework.
You could also take a look at the FormatConvertedBitmap, ColorConvertedBitmap or WritableBitmap Class's

For a simpler solution that doesn't require pulling in huge libraries and lets you understand what's going on under their hood (and thus gives you greater flexibility), learn how to use WPF Pixel Shaders (google it).
Then you can use something like the multiply shader here: http://rakeshravuri.blogspot.com/2008/08/blending-modes-in-wpf-using.html

Picture matching from webcam pictures with picture noise problem

Hy
I take two pictures from a webcam and split them into a 9 pieces. Then i match the pieces of the two pictures. The problem is that my webcam have a picture noise. So my programm thinks that in every piece of the second picture have chanced something.
I need a logical push to solve my problem please help.

The pictures from the web cam will never exactly match - even the slightest change in lighting will cause a difference. For this kind of picture matching you have to use a forgiving algorithm that allows at least some change and still makes a match. Create a histogram of each image, then calculating the difference seems to be a promising approach.
See the following threads on SO (just for examples, there are many more threads):
Image comparison - fast algorithm
Image comparison algorithm
Also I would check out Emgu if you are working with .NET, this is a .NET wrapper for openCV, a computer vision library.