After a long and tiresome day, I come to you now, at sundown, to put some things in writing. Looking through the old, dusty and crumbling archives I managed to collect some scrolls about a very very interesting and useful ritual by the name of PIX. My memories of what PIX stands for are not too fresh (maybe it's yesterday's feast, or maybe not...), but for now I'll just assume it comes from Pictorum Informatias eXtractorum. If you think this is uses to carefully inspect elements of images and artworks created with XNA and that other API (Apparatus Procesarum Imaginus ?) called DirectX, like you would do with a clear and carefully crafted magnification glass, then you would be correct.

The first instructions to use PIX in XNA were laid out by the now familiar XNA sorcerer Manders, in his scroll about a "painless" introduction to PIX, way back in the first year of XNA. Then, two moon later, the grand master wizard Shawn incited our collective minds, by decreeing that PIX is "it is just like totally awesome, dude, and you should definitely try it", but not going into more details about it.

No matter... no matter... This only proved to be a slight delay, because a dozen moons later, Brian son of Richard of the GarageGames clan wrote a detailed and clear chronicle about how he used PIX to get some insects out of some pixels (I don't know why they use words like debug, when this sounds so much better).

In another one of his Scrolls of XNA Recommendations, bittermanandy talked about PIX and why you should use it.

Next, in the spring of this year the great clan and spell-weavers at Microsoft sent one of their own to the Gaamus Developerus Conferentius, to spread word to the whole world about the ritual I cover in this pages. All that he said was recorder for eternity, together with his drawings.

Lastly, XNA wizard MJP of the Mostus Valuabilus Profesionalus kind wrote a long long long parchment where in great detail, the invocation and usage of PIX was described.

And in the end, I dicovered a cache of scrolls in the MSDN library with a great number of tutorials about PIX.

My eyes are getting weary now, but I will not leave before I tell you what we will look at nex... (zzzzzz, snore, zzzzz..).....

Have a nice reading, and I wholeheartedly hope it helps at least some of my usual readers.

It all began years ago, when XNA was still freshly and incompletely summoned into this world. People realized that now that they could let their creations loose in the alternate reality plane of the Xbox. But there was a problem. While normal creations in the PC-land could be watched through a perfectly clear portal, looking into Xbox-land was often done through rounded looking-glasses, that made distortions at the edges. Because of this, apprentices had to take care to keep the most interesting and attractive parts of their masterpieces in the center of the looking-glass.

Manders, one of the high-wizards of DirectX-guild, was playing around with XNA, and he decided to help others out, by making a catalyst potion (helper class) that apprentices could use to see how much the edges of rounded looking glasses could affect them.

As I am writing these lines, I realized in almost fell in the same trap as others have before me... The distortion at the edges of round looking-glasses also happens in newly crafted modern flat looking-glasses made from LCD or plasma materials. Keep that in mind always.

After a long time has passed, the arch-mages decided that the Third Incarnation of XNA should offer something to help with all the calculations that needed to be done for proper mirror-edge-distortion support. This was done by adding the minor enhancemet TitleSafeArea to the Viewport and DisplayMode spell components. And to make sure everyone understand how to use this, they filled the land with a free sample recipe.

Other apprentices did not give up the struggle against edge distortions, and proposed alternate means of avoiding distortions, through the Options and Zooming spells. A great debate followed, obviously, with no side giving up on their opinions. The subject reappears again later, and you can see the opinions of several chroniclers here. Also, if at any one time you think that the restrictions imposed by edge-distortion is too high, think again, because not all mirrors are created equally.

In the end, I will let you study the writing of one of our favorite chronicler of XNA-history. Here, he talks about edge-distortions, and other problems that are closely intertwined with it. He then goes to recommend you to stick blue foreign substances on you mirrors, to help out.... strange....

Let's start with the spring of 2007 (Year 1 of the Age of XNA). As brave programmers started using XNA, they started to worry about the effects that this new form of magic would have on their surroundings, which had to be kept free of residual energies (a.k.a. garbage). People were most worried about the foreach spell, rumored to generate such energies. Thus, the mighty wizard Eli looked into the problem, and wrote two scrolls on how the foreach spell is better used, but most importantly, he left us notes on how to investigate such problems ourselves, through a ritual called memory profiling, using the CLR Profiler, and the XNA Framework Remote Performance Monitor for Xbox 360. These two scrolls can be found and read in Eli's book here and here.

At the same time, another XNA apprentice wrote about a related ritual called CPU profiling, through which other XNA apprentices could learn why their creations were slow, and lazy, by using a tool called NProf. Those that want to can still read Thomas Aylesworth's writings here.

Over a year later, bittermanandy was writing a chronicle about what recipes and rituals he found most useful in his delvings into XNA, and in one of these chronicles, he touched on the subject of the CLR Profiler again. That same year, jwatte gave away a free potion that could be used for performing the profiling ritual in the kingdom of the Xbox 360, which was not possible using NProf. MJP made a comparison between events and virtual functions, using the Stopwatch spell, and left his writing for all to read in one of his scrolls.

More recently, in Year 3 of the Age of XNA, the Grand Master Wizard Shawn, reminded all of us how important is that we use the profiling rituals as often as possible, and gave us an example of using the blunt yet powerful spell Stopwatch.

We hope you liked our return to past scrolls of wisdom, and found something of help in them. Please let us know what you think, and leave a note in the notebook below.