Graphics tablet/stylus library - c#

Does anyone know of any libraries for .net that allow you to use graphics tablets?
specifically i am after the pressure sensitivity of the pen, but the 'eraser' and buttons on the pen would be useful too.
thanks

I have also discovered that WPF also has an InkCanvas, which has everything built into it.

Have a look at the source for Paint.NET
EDIT: There should also be a DLL there...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vbtablet/
It worked for me. At least for a while. Now I'm having some problems with it, and trying to find another one. If my search fails, I'm going to use the Windows API directly.

Microsoft's RealTimeStylus API gives access to all pen/stylus data.

Related

Always on top, even in fullscreen-games

How do you put a Windows Form Application on top off everything on your screen?
Just setting the topmost-property isn't enough when you're running fullscreen games.
If anyone has a solution for good old Forms i'll also be happy
I've seen many posts on this forum that say it's impossible but i know it's not couse i've seen alot of apps (fraps, teamspeak overlay, xfire, etc) that does this.
If you want to use a graphics library to display something always on screen, you may want to start here on SO. There are wrapper libraries available like OpenTK for OpenGL. If you want to go the DirectX route you'll need to load in the C++ libraries and access them using P/Invoke. There's a good tutorial to start with on msdn. Wrappers for DirectX also exist in the form of SharpDX.

Setting webcam properties

I am writing a C# Windows Form application which communicates with a webcam.
However, I want to tune webcam properties inside a button click function. Examples of those properties are brightness, saturation and sharpness.
I have found IAMVideoProcAmp::Set which might aid me with this. However, I don't quite understand how to implement this.
Can anyone help me in the right direction?
What you'll need to do is wrap calls to certain APIs (whether it's Windows, DirectX, etc) which is easier said than done when it comes to C#.
Luckily this problem has been solved numerous times (as you can see by number of webcam questions here) - and you can find one good approach in the following article:
Versatile WebCam C# library
Check out "How to change contrast and saturation programmatically?"

How to use SlimDX inside a WPF C# application

i'm totally new to SlimDX and WPF, but i need to create a multiple images in my application and one of them need to be a 3d visualizator of a point render, something like this:
http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/5879/6a00d83452464869e2017ee.gif
I found i can use SlimDX to use DirectX by C# instruction in my application, writing the result in a D3DImage component.
After some tries i made visual studio 2012 to recoignize that D3DImage (for some reason i needed to restart windows to made it work) but i don't know a few things:
How i can initialize a DirectX window inside that D3DImage? I really can't find any example or source code. All the examples i can find (like the 3 litte examples on SlimDX) are out of the WPF context
Where i can find some good documentation about SlimDX? The GameDev community seems some kinda bugged and i can't post anything (maybe because i'm not paying) and i can't find anything anywhere! How i'm supposed to learn that?
Not a single one of the SlimDX examples from the SVN can compile. I always got some reference error with the SlimDX library (empty path) and even re-importing from the correct path doesn't solve it
This is driving my crazy D:
I feel your pain. I haven't be working to much with the D3D stuff in SlimDX for lack of a reason to do so, But I have been playing around with DirectSound and DirectInput, So i'll tell you what i've figured out.
First Bullet:
I'm not sure initializing a D3D Window inside of an image is going to work. If you're using Windows Forms as your base, SlimDX includes a RenderForm or some such thing that subclasses Windows.Forms, and provides a decent amount of functionality. I still haven't figured it out for WPF, even though there's supposed to be a sample for that.
Second Bullet: Documentation is difficult to come by. There's some stuff on the site, and some stuff here, but what's really been helpful is the MSDN Reference for DirectX. SlimDX Mirrors the structures pretty well, and you can find out a lot by reading it. It DOES take a bit of conversion, because the DirectX reference is C++.
Third Bullet: Same problem. Never was able to figure out why.
Hope that helps a bit.

Dynamic user-interface, WPF or not?

I'm currently working at a application that helps people understand how to do there job. You can see it as a personal coach that guides them trough all the steps they need to do that no normal person could keep remembering.
In my previous application we had the ability to show the user up to 4 pictures (what proves to be more then enough). The application would load the data and see how many pictures where in every instruction and then sort out the picture in the best fitting way without messing up the scale and resolution of the pictures. This all was done with GDI+ and worked very well.
Ofc, change is something that always happens, my bosses came up with some great ideas. So they want to be able to see movies on the screen, animated gif's, 3D models that can rotate or animate. So I think we had pushed GDI+ to it's limits and it's time to look for something different.
I have heard and readed about WPF but have no experience with it. Is it even possible to do all what I ask in WPF? And what about the old picture-merging thing I wrote, can we also get it done in wpf? I tried to make some things working but I didn't went as smooth as I hoped.
I'm also concerned about the fact that the interface needs to be dynamic, the one moment it should be showing picture with some text above it, the other moment it should be showing another text with a video under it.
I would love to hear some opinions here and if you got some other suggestions I should look into pls tell me. Thnx in advance
PS: If WPF is the choice, should I convince my boss to change to .net 4.0?
Although my answer can be termed subjective, I find WPF better than GDI+ anyday. You can do everything you can in WPF which you have done/could do in GDI+ (apart from pure games/game engines). If you can afford the steep learning curve of WPF, I think it will be better investment as this technology is not going anywhere soon.
As for .Net 4.0, WPF 4.0 does introduces some important functions in 4.0 (specially easing functions for animations) but there is nothing you cannot do without if you are using 3.5. I won't recommend 3.0 though mainly because of performance in animations.
WPF is up to the task, but you could also check other options.
You could go web based, and have either an XBAP (WPF in the browser), or Silverlight/Flash app.
Silverlight/Flash doesn't require that much from the client (to install), and is easily updatable, and both can do the job.

Gdi Guidance required

I am currently working in C# with wpf, I don't know about graphics, I want to learn about GDI and graphics from scratch, Can anyone help me by providing some basic knowledge or material?
Can anyone tell me to write very first program using Gdi?
If you want to learn about WPF I really suggest "Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed"
http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Presentation-Foundation-Unleashed-WPF/dp/0672328917
Also check out this video from the PDC - Mastering WPF Graphics and beyond:
http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/CL31
And if you still want to check out GDI you should read this book
http://www.amazon.com/NET-Game-Programming-DirectX-9-0/dp/1590590511/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259061198&sr=1-1
It starts out with GDI+ basics and then moves on to DirectX.
Even though it's written for VB.NET you'll get a great deal out of it as a c# developer as well. It helped me back in the days and writing the games in the book is just downright fun :p
(Hint: There is a huge performance issue with the first example in the book, try to solve it, it'll help you understand things even better).
I would advise you to take a look at the msdn, usually they have the best resource on the web. Also some tutorial website like code-project.com might help.

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