Shazzam development is moving again
Shazzam is changing. There hasn’t been much improvement to Shazzam this year and that’s a shame. Especially since there is an influx of Silverlight developers exploring the benefits that pixel shaders bring to their projects.
Many of you have discovered Shazzam via enthusiastic support from the WPF and Silverlight community. Thank you Laurent Bugnion, Josh Smith, daneshmandi, Karl Shifflett, Adam Kinney, Craig Shoemaker and Polymorphic Podcast, Channel9, Andy Beaulieu, Bill Reiss, René Schulte, the Silverlight 3 Programmer’s Reference crew, Dave Campbell (WynApse and Silverlight Cream) , Tim Heuer, Jeff Prosise, Matt Castro and many more that I don’t have links for.
I’m flattered that my little utility is finding a home on so many desktops. It’s nice to hear about the projects you’ve created with Shazzam’s help. For example, check out daneshmandis Face Maker application for an superb example of WPF in action. Being developers you’ve not been shy about expressing your desire for new features either. Which brings me to Eric.
Agent of Change
Say hello to Eric Stollnitz.s
Eric has worked at Microsoft for seven years, first helping to create the Expression Blend user-interface design tool, and more recently helping the Interactive Visual Media group of Microsoft Research develop innovative ideas into shipping software.
Some of you might know his work. He was on the Expression Blend team and also did some work on Peter Blois’s Snoop utility.
Eric has been a great help in getting development on Shazzam moving again. It all started when he wanted to make a couple changes to improve Shazzam’s ability to generate Silverlight shaders. Here’s Eric explaining how he got involved, “Yeah, at first I just wanted two features: remembering default values for shader registers, and generating Silverlight-compatible C# code. Then it kind of snowballed…”
Snowballed is an understatement. Eric has done some great work on the project. I will be chronicling improvements in the next release (many of which are from him) over the next couple days but first let me give you glimpse one of Eric’s contributions.
You can specify minValue, maxValue and defaultValue for values for registers using triple-slash comments in the shader code. The generated C#-VB class gets these values supplied for the defaults. Plus the testing UI is initialized with these settings too. No more reentering values every time you compile the shader!
There’s plenty of other changes. Stay tuned.
As always, you can install Shazzam from the shazzam-tool.com site. The new version will be available by next week.