Ars Technica picked up a report on a study on Windows Vista performance that was conducted at Principled Technologies, a technology assessment company in North Carolina. There's lots of good data in the study about the performance of Windows Vista on a handful of different hardware platforms. One of the highlights for me was reading that they ...

Some folks have noticed that when they run Java applets in the browser, that Aero and desktop composition would get disabled.  This was due to Java locking the primary buffer, and when that happens, the DWM no longer has access to the resources needed to draw the desktop, therefore we disable desktop composition.  Sun has since addressed ...

I've seen a couple of cool uses in the past week of the DWM Thumbnail API (described in my previous post) and wanted to share them here. ''Simon on the .NET'' wrote a great-looking Exposé-like mini-app that, when you press F12, shows a representation of all the desktop windows in a grid.  The original desktop is shown behind the ...

For the most part, the Vista Desktop Window Manager is an end-user feature.  However, because it so fundamentally changes the game of how the desktop gets composed, there was both the opportunity and the requirement to introduce a relatively small number of APIs that impact how the DWM operates, and allows the programmer to take advantage of ...

I received a number of great comments and questions on my last post about High DPI Support in Windows Aero Vista. Adrian makes a very strong comment about applications that do in fact work correctly at high DPI, and scale appropriately, and in general are very good ''DPI citizens'', however, they haven't set the manifest for Vista to claim that ...

A good amount of ink has been spilled on this blog talking about all the cost, nuance, impact, and techniques we go through to get a composited desktop.  Less ink is spilled on the benefits of the composited desktop.  Those were most broadly covered in this initial post.  I'd like to expand on one such benefit here -- High ...

In the earlier posts I've done on the DWM, there's been a hint of the relationship between it and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, aka Avalon).  This post delves deeper into that relationship.  Because of core OS component requirements (the desktop itself of course being a core OS component) regarding the use of managed code, ...

As mentioned in earlier posts, by far the most important aspect of the DWM is the fact that application windows are redirected to render offscreen, and then the DWM is responsible for compositing those windows to the screen.  So, how exactly does that happen?  That's what this post is all about.  Redirection is a fairly complex ...

The Problem Ever since the advent of dedicated graphics processors, even old-school graphics processors that only accelerated GDI blits, the way you would program against them would be similar to how you programmed against the main CPU/memory system before there was virtual memory or interruptible/preemptible processes.  That is, you'd have ...

Here's a list of topics that I have posted on (with active links) or expect to post on (without links) related to the Desktop Window Manager in Windows Vista. Under the Hood of the Desktop Window Manager -- a technical introduction (and response to comments) DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration (and response to comments) ...