Advice for developing DirectX control

[opellegr]

I'm considering creating a managed DirectX version of a control to address
some rendering performance issues, but some of the things I've read while
doing research has led me to believe this might be a bad idea. If I'm
reading things correctly, Managed DirectX is a deprecated technology and
users interested in using DirectX via managed code should use XNA. Some of
my colleagues have mentioned that XNA is set up to favor games development
and therefore getting it to perform control rendering would be a pain.

Is it correct that using Managed DirectX for rendering a control would be a
bad idea, since it seems like the technology is unsupported? If so, is it
relatively easy to use XNA to render a control? Is it simply a bad idea to
try to use DirectX for rendering controls?

[ZMan]

Technically if you understand how to make an activeX control safely and you
are happy to take the dependencies that come with using managed code in an
activex control (you MAY need to make all your users download the .Net
framework) then its possible.

The live maps 3d viewer uses its own managed wrapper around DirectX AFAIK
(download it and fire up reflector) - but it may be a winforms control in
the browser rather than activeX - similar technology but different security
model.

XNA FX has most of the features from MDX. Missing are:
* the fixed function pipeline - so you need a SM1.1 card on the machine
* DirectInput/Sound (though you are PC nly so you could interop to those)
* No dynamic loading of 3d models - they need to be preprocessed at compile
time using the content pipeline. So you can't just allow end user to laod
arbitrry stuff.

Otherwise you won't notie many differences.

Post by opellegr
I'm considering creating a managed DirectX version of a control to address
some rendering performance issues, but some of the things I've read while
doing research has led me to believe this might be a bad idea. If I'm
reading things correctly, Managed DirectX is a deprecated technology and
users interested in using DirectX via managed code should use XNA. Some of
my colleagues have mentioned that XNA is set up to favor games development
and therefore getting it to perform control rendering would be a pain.
Is it correct that using Managed DirectX for rendering a control would be a
bad idea, since it seems like the technology is unsupported? If so, is it
relatively easy to use XNA to render a control? Is it simply a bad idea to
try to use DirectX for rendering controls?