SHARPGL 2.4 RELEASED

Release

Yesterday we released SharpGL 2.4. SharpGL is an open source library that makes the OpenGL available for your Microsoft .NET applications. You can find the project at GitHub here, the release notes for 2.4 here and the change log here. The project is maintained by Dave Kerr.

Installation

You can add SharpGL via NuGet to your solution. These are the NuGet package manager commands:

# If you just need to call OpenGL APIs...
Install-Package SharpGL
# If you want to use SharpGL controls for WinForms...
Install-Package SharpGL.WinForms
# If you want to use SharpGL controls for WPF...
Install-Package SharpGL.WPF

You can also install the SharpGL extensions for Visual Studio 2013. Go to the main menu “TOOLS\Extensions and Updates” and search for SharpGL. The extensions provides project templates for WinForms and WPF applications.

New Features

• SharpGL now supports OpenGL 4.3 completely.
• The new Visual Studio 2013 extensions reference SharpGL via NuGet rather than via hard references to binaries. That makes the extensions more flexible and easier to maintain.
• There was an issue with calling OpenGL extension functions. In older versions, OpenGL extension functions were called by dynamic invocation of delegates. In version 2.4 those delegates are called statically. That improves performance by about 30%.
• All imported APIs now use ‘SetLastError = true’ to aid in analyzing issues without performance impact.
• There are some more improvements regarding stability.

What’s next

Now we are working on SharpGL 2.5. You can find the backlog here. This will be a short-time release because we aim to develop on SharpGL 3.0 which will bring a lot of big changes. SharpGL 2.5 will support OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5. Further, we like to provide the extensions for Visual Studio 2015. We want to take another big step to continuous integration regarding nightly builds, automatic unit test execution and a lot more.

If you have any question, need help or want to participate in SharpGL development, please do not hesitate to contact Dave Kerr and me via GitHub or any other channel.