Eric Sink is a great technical writer. He wrote a wonderful series about the business of software and authored a twenty-two part series describing how to market your software business.
Today he starts a twelve part series chronicling his adventures with WPF 3D.
WPF 3D doesn’t know how to draw lines.
Shocking as it may seem, WPF 3D considers triangles to be more fundamental than lines. Everything in 3D is a triangle. If you want to draw a line, you have to somehow do it by using triangles.
Actually, this is not all that shocking once you really think about it. The problem with a line is that it’s too fundamental. Geometrically speaking, a line has zero width. If you asked WPF to draw a line, it would have nothing to draw. A triangle is the simplest bit of geometry that actually has any surface area.
We think that drawing a line should be simple. In 2D graphics, it is. But in 3D graphics, where the picture on your screen is a 2D projection of a 3D world which uses a completely different coordinate system, it’s not.
But still, sometimes we want to draw something that we think of as a line. Maybe we want a wireframe view of our 3D scene. Maybe we just want to highlight the edges of a solid figure to make it easier to see. In practical terms, we know intuitively what we want when we think of “a line”. Usually, we just want it to be one pixel wide on the screen.
Looks like Eric is off to a great start. I’m looking forward to reading every post!
-Walt Ritscher
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