Finally after a couple of months of hard work and polishing the code, API and performance, version 0.8.8.6 of Balder is out. A SampleBrowser can be found here for viewing most of the features of Balder.
The features that has changed or is new are as follows:

* Introduced Silverlight in Core, but still maintaining platform independence
  - Using core objects directly in Xaml can now be done

* Removed all controls in Balder.Core.Silverlight.Controls - not needed anymore

* Introduced View namespace with IView interface and Camera implementing it

* Viewport has View property insted of Camera

* Moved rendering from a multithread environment to run synchronously on the CompositionTarget. It gives better performance, due to synchronization issues between all threads. Will be revisited in the future.

* New drawing routines, optimized

* Heightmap primitive

* Box primitive

* Rotation, Scale on nodes

* Cylinder primitive

* DebugLevel is known as DebugInfo

* Material system in place

* Support for ReflectionMapping on materials

* Double sided materials

* Sprite rendering with alpha channel

* NodesControl - datadriven nodes control with templating - In Balder.Silverlight.Controls

* NodesStack - datadriven stacking of nodes with templating - in Balder.Silverlight.Controls

Its been crazy weeks since I decided to pull 0.8.8.5, but it was for the better. The result is that the rendering speed and quality has gone up quite dramatically. The next version of Balder will be 0.8.8.6 and will contain at least the following: 

- Optimized framebuffer management

- Optimized drawing/rendering

- Optimized lighting

- Proper polygon clipping against the viewport 

- Completely refactored way of handling objects, no duplication in the type hierarchy for Balder, like in 0.8.8.0.

- New controls : NodesControl, NodesStack - similar as Canvas and StackPanel works with 2D elements in Silverlight

- New geometry types; Box, Cylinder, Plane

- Transparency for objects / materials

- Introducing the concept of View, you can now create custom cameras

- DebugLevel is no longer flag-based, but a self contained object with properties for all Debug options

- Rendering is now synchronously - gives better framerate in most scenarios, but hogs up rendering event. Ongoing process.

Its been crazy since december with a lot of work being put into Balder and more to come. I don't have a date yet for when I'll have the release, but I'll try to push it as soon as I'm content with the result. 

Balder is rapidly moving from being a proof of concept for rotating a box in 3D as it was in early 2007 to becoming a quality library that can be used for gaming and line of business applications. Thanks to all that has shown interest in the project by using it, writing books about it, creating your own demos and posting it, and last but not least companies like Sapient - that took a leap of faith and went with Balder for visualization on a Silverlight project they are doing for a client they have.

A little more than a month ago, I came to an agreement with Sapient on helping them out using Balder on a non-disclosed client project. The Balder project itself is not affected by it, licensing or ownership wise. But it is affected in a rather positive way, it gives me the extra motivation to keep adding features and at a much faster rate than before. Although it might seem "quiet" on the outside, seeing thats there been more than 4 weeks since a release - its very hectic from where I'm sitting. I'm at high speed and turning out code as fast as I can. I will try to get a release out now and then, and hopefully we'll see one out in a short time span. More on the upcoming release in another post. Stay tuned.

2010 is just a couple of days away, I thought I'd do a recap of 2009 and what has happened in my little world. :) 

Back in August 2008 Balder was at a proof of concept stage and I had close to abandoned the project, I had so many things I wanted to do which resulted in not doing anything. Along came a couple of emails from Clinton Rocksmith who found the project interesting and wanted to know how he could contribute. I was really surprised, I never imagined anyone actually looking at the project. Timing was a bit off, I had just signed a contract with a new company and never got around to prioritize Balder, other projects always came in the way. Again, a couple of months later the project was at a stand still and I was getting again to a point of almost abandoning it completely. In the beginning of 2009 though, I got contacted by Gastón Hillar who also found the project interesting and wanted to include a couple of samples in his upcoming book. This spun me completely of my axis. I worked closely with Gastón in providing him the best possible solution and bring Balder to a new level. For me this was a true turning point for Balder and I quickly decided to put all other projects on a complete halt and focus my energy on Balder. The result was that we managed to get Balder to an API level that felt a lot better, performance was increased with several hundred percent and the codebase quality was increased dramatically with retrofitting unit tests for critical parts. 

The project was all of a sudden going somewhere, it was time to look for other developers to join in. A good friend of mine; Petri Wilhelmsen joined the project and has contributed a bit and will commit more time next year to the project. Another friend of mine; Raymond Holmboe has been contributing some on and off since I started the project back in the days and will be committing more time next year as well to the project. 

The ultimate result from all of this is that there has been quite a few commercial interests in the project, everything from companies wanting to buy the project as a whole to companies wanting to utilize it professionally. This is something I can disclose more information on later next year. One thing is certain though, Balder will stay open source and free to use.

Also this year, I was suggested as a Silverlight MVP and was eventually moved from Xna to Silverlight. Thanks to Justin Angel for recognizing me and suggesting the move, its a true honor. 

Although I had a very nice job at Objectware, the distance of 125 KM to work one way was to big. Even though I didn't commute everyday, it got to be a strain on my family when I had to go early in the morning and wasn't back till late and most nights after the kids had gone to bed. So I started sniffing the market to see if there was opportunities closer to home. I ended up at a company called Bouvet, and don't regret my decision. Bouvet has in my opinion the right focus for consultants, and it just feels right. Happy to be onboard.

Professionally I've had the opportunity to work full time on a Enterprise Silverlight project, I've worked on two Microsoft Surface projects, some WPF projects and finally ended up spending the last 3-4 months of the year working on an ASP.net MVC project with some Silverlight content.  

Its also been a very busy year when it comes to speaking engagements, I've been part of Microsoft Norways MSDN Live tour, been speaking at NNUG a couple of times, Game Camp, did a Silverlight course. 

2009 has truly been an exciting year, busy, but very exciting. With the release of Silverlight 3 this summer and the beta version of Silverlight 4, I'm at a point were I really can't wait to get out of bed in the morning and just find the keyboard and start hacking away. It has never been more fun to be a developer, a lot is happening these days, not only in the Microsoft arena, but in general. I can't wait to see what 2010 brings.

Happy new year everyone, looking forward to participate next year. Thanks to everyone who has made 2009 so much fun and exciting, especially I'd like to thank my wife and kids, who has really been patient with me and supported me along the way. 

A couple of days ago I published a new version of Balder; 0.8.8.5. It had a bunch of improvements in it, especially when it comes to the Silverlight Control support. I had to pull the release mere hours after its release. The reason for pulling it was that I did a lot of optimizations in the rendering, or at least I thought I did. Turns out that when running on a very fast Dual core or Quad core computer, it was faster - but on slower machines, it turned out to be quite slow. 

Instead of reverting the entire optimization, I've decided to actually get the performance up quite a bit. I've been working on a new rendering pipeline that would increase the performance dramatically, so no time like the present.

The biggest change however with the release was the Xaml support. In the Development branch over at GitHub you will find source code with the rendering pipeline being the same as in version 0.8.8.0, but with all the new Xaml support. So if you can't wait for the optimizations and want to get your Xaml right from the start - you should go pull the latest on the Development branch and compile the binaries yourself. In fact, it should be fairly simple to do it, just download it and run the build.cmd file from a command prompt and it will output a Drop directory with all the binaries in it.

UPDATE, 16th of December 2009 : Release was pulled due to issues with rendering. New release will be pushed soon. 

Its that time again, yet another release of Balder. You're probably thinking - whats going on? Pushing releases close to every week.

Well, this release had to be pushed out fast, the reason being that a couple of days after the previous release I realized that the Xaml support introduced felt good while using it, but clearly had its limitations and also maintainability issues when working with the library.

In the previous release I introduced the Xaml support as Controls in the Balder.Silverlight assembly, which seemed like a fair place to have it, seeing that Xaml/Controls are a very specific platform option that Silverlight supports and should not be present in Core. Problem with that was that we now had two object hierarchies to maintain, one just reflecting most of the properties already found in Core and doing some crazy magic to maintain these hierarchies. Needless to say, this approach is very error prone and hard to maintain.

Dependency Properties

The main reasons for not pushing the Control support into Core was the fact that I didn't want DependencyProperties leaking into it all over the place and not wanting types to derive from DependencyObject or any other Silverlight specific type. So what I came up with is to make the types in question partial and implement the Silverlight specifics in a .Silverlight.cs file - which then could be skipped for other platforms. Then for DependencyProperties, I wrapped everything up in a generic Property type that has a Specific Silverlight implementation that again can change for other platforms.

The result is a more maintainable codebase, and a better experience when using it.

Speedups

Another reason for pushing for another release was the fact that I did some heavy optimizations. Earlier when doing optimizations, I worked mostly with Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta. For SL2 I created a RawPngBufferStream, since no WriteableBitmap was available there, and for SL3 beta, the WriteableBitmap was quite different than what the final RTW version had going for it. Long story short, I ended up with a multithreading scenario that gave quite a performance boost. 

After looking at this for quite some time, I found that it would be better to have multiple WriteableBitmaps and do triplebuffering with these and use different threads for different purposes (Clearing, Rendering, Showing). Turns out that this was quite efficient, only problem was that synchronization turned out to be a bit of a problem. So I did a test with doing all the operations synchronously in the CompositionTargets event, and it gave a serious performance boost. That combined with some optimized ways of clearing surely seemed to do wonders.

The new release is available from here. 

On the 9th of February, Software 2010 is kicked off. Petri Wilhelmsen and myself will be holding an hour on game development with managed code using Microsoft Xna and Silverlight (featuring Balder). We will be focusing on 3D development and cross-platform using .net.

Really looking forward to doing a co-op with Petri.

For more details and signup, go here. 

We're not about to slow down the development of Balder anytime soon, next release is something we're already hard at work with. 

If you want to be influence the priority or have features you'd love to see in it thats not already on the list, please don't hesitate to go to our Issue list over at GitHub and vote, comment or add new issues. You'll find the issue list here. 

Its been a busy month getting all "loose" ends in the Balder project tied up. Hopefully we haven't left anyone still in here. 

For this release we've been focusing on bug fixing, cleaning up the APIs and getting better "native" Silverlight support through Xaml. The release and details about it can be found here. 

Xaml support has been very important for this release, and not only exposing objects and initialization in Xaml, but also being able to manipulate it. The end result is now that you can do a lot of the magic in Xaml without having to touch base with C# at all. For the next release there will be even more focus on this, getting better support for Blend design-time, storyboarding and general editing experience in Blend. But also the support for MVVM style development, so one can get better separation in the code.

We are in the midst of creating tutorials for this new release, as there are major changes and new features that needs some explaining. 

We're getting closer to the BETA mark for Balder, and we're starting to get most of the features we want in for version 1 ready. The latest feature is the ability to declaratively through Xaml get Balder up and running. Current release is versioned 0.8.7 and can be found over at the Balder page at Codeplex.

By adding the following namespace declaration in your Xaml file:

You now get a set of extra controls that can be used.

First off is the RenderingContainer:

You need to specify the Width and Height, as that is used to setup the display properly. The BackgroundColor property can be any color, including transparent - which is great if you want to mix with existing Silverlight controls on your page. 

The next control we've added is the Mesh control, it enables you to add any Mesh from a file/resource to the RenderingContainer. You do this by accessing the Nodes property on the Container and putting up a RenderedNodeCollection and put your Mesh(es) within that.

For now, there is a limited amount of DependencyProperties exposed, so manipulation via Storyboards aren't possible today, but will be very soon. The only way to access this is by hooking up the Updated event on the RenderingContainer and implement codebehind logic for it, something like this:

Last but not least, to get it all working, you need to initialize Balder. In your App.xaml.cs file, during the Application_Startup event, you need to add one line of code. It is very important for now that you add that line before your page (RootVisual) is created and set.

I you want to use it the "conventional" way - non Xaml based, you need to add a similar line of code, but that line of code needs to be added after the page has been created. This is something that makes absolutely no sense and is something we're trying to fix and make it a lot more sense. Our goal is to get rid of that line of code all together.

A little note, we're not trying to mimick the WPF 3D namespaces at all, we're going our own direction. We don't feel the urge to replicate those, as the purpose of Balder is very different.