They are not required to do anything. First of all they can never stop software piracy. Secondly the music and movie industry needs Microsoft more than vice versa as you can read under the section Mini-FAQ "4. Microsoft is only doing this because Hollywood/the music industry is forcing them to." in the cost analysis document. I wonder what will come next.

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Well for applications like trillian with its own SkinEngine based on GDI/GDI+ operations it might be a huge difference. Using alphablending and shadows is out of the question, you are forced to use WPF. So you probably have to rewrite your whole application. Same goes for me I have my own SkinEngine based on GDI/GDI+ which runs very fast in XP with hardware acceleration for alphablending/blitting/font drawing etc. I have buggish ATI drivers which will disable the hardware acclerations if I use only a single display and enable it with two displays. So I can see a huge difference in speed when the drawing is not accelerated. I find it very unsettling... Edit: And what is more unsettling is that Trillian is coded in C++ and I am coding in C++ and Visual Studio offers no integration with WPF using C++/CLI! Although Microsoft claims that they will be adding it later (I think Nish wrote that somewhere). -- modified at 16:32 Wednesday 10th January, 2007

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"So the answer is No, as long as nVidia or ATI, or you make the interface for any other API." So as of today there is no support for GDI/GDI+ acceleration in the DWM ? Why would nVidia, ATI and other vendors be interested in implementing such? This probably means that the answer is yes and will be yes, which makes me kindof sad, since you now HAVE to use the .NET framework to be able to get hardware acceleration. The WPF applications are very bloated, I wonder how much memory we will need when all applications we run have their GUI in WPF. I dont like Vista at all with its content protection and now this :sigh:

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You have any info on the subject?

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lol, nice one!

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I read on Wikipedia[^] that "GDI and GDI+ applications running in the new compositing engine, Desktop Window Manager, will no longer be hardware-accelerated." Does the Desktop Window Manager only work with the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) ? This sounds crazy! Apparently the desktop window manager is only used when using the Aero skin? So if you use the Aero-skin you only get hardware acceleration in programs using the WPF, and if you're not using the Aero skin your GDI/GDI+ applications are still hardware accelerated? I hope someone with a little knowledge and insight of Vista can enlighten me about this. I am very confused.

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Has anyone of you guys read this Article ?[^] I find it appauling how Microsoft is allowed to do this. Any thoughts on the subject? Also have a look at this movie[^].

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Perhaps I'm missing something here but would'nt it be nice if you didnt remove all whitespace indentation when you add to a post?? Posted code looks like sh*t! Perhaps I'm missing out on something though, if so I'm sorry about the post but please enlighten me how to keep the indent and whitespace :-D

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I have a WindowsXP memory question. I have a program with one thread and a windows messageloop that runs in mainprocessthread. I create two windows. The memory usage is about 1mb, I minimize one window, and the same memory usage. But when I minimize the second widow so all windows are minimized the memory usage goes down to 200k. I have tried to simulate this programmaticaly (minimize all windows) but I have only managed to get WindowsXP to cache away the memory when I minimize the windows manually... anyone got any info on this? ----------------------------- I am out of scope