Repository for all sorts of quick, simple, sometimes also a bit more extensive Demos for conferences, .NET Blog Posts, LinkedIn- or other social media posts, or just for public Prototyping.
The current featured demo is the WARP DirectX Wall Clock — a WinForms
.NET 11 analog clock where every part (face, numerals, ticks, hands, arbour)
is its own DirectComposition visual, composed on a dedicated render thread and
styled by stock or drop-in plug-in themes. It doubles as a demo of the new
.NET 11 KioskModeManager component (F11 fullscreen, taskbar hiding, sleep
suppression, wake events).
The headline trick: the engine alone owns time and hand pointing, so a theme
can relocate anchors and restyle visuals but can never show the wrong time —
move the hour numerals into a column on the left and the hour hand's tip simply
follows them (with an adjustable 1–30 s grace catch-up). Building it added a
per-visual transform API (Transform / SetRotation) to WARP's D2DVisual.
The expanded platform now includes Day/Night/OLED variants, animated stock
NERD, Scatter, and Logical themes, timezone-aware optional visuals,
Themesets, per-theme persisted properties, an app-owned ticker, and a
FluentTabControl Options dialog. Author a plug-in from a natural-language
description with the warpclock-theme-authoring skill.
WARP DirectX Wall Clock README
The Layout Tester is a WinForms .NET 10
prototype for poking at High-DPI cascaded layout: how AutoScaleMode
propagates through nested UserControl containers when the host form moves
between monitors at different DPI under PerMonitorV2.
You build up a probe set of nested carrier containers in the editor, configure each one's scaling parameters individually (CTor vs Lazy construction, scale apply phase, design resolution, font, percent), save the set to disk, then launch a separate carrier form that actually instantiates the hierarchy. Drag that carrier form between monitors of different scaling factors and watch how each level of the cascade behaves.
Same scenario as the screenshot below — we have been ending up at this kind of layout exploration session. (OK — I did go in one more time, and asked the WinForms Expert Agent to do one more tweak.)
How did we get here? Well — wait for the Episode, and tune in! :-)
WinForms .NET 10 demo / tool built on the WARP Git services that composes a
single working branch from a chosen set of feature branches on top of a
fetched base branch. Validates each candidate against the fetched base before
composing (no stale-state surprises), surfaces all git activity in an
embedded console, and handles conflicts explicitly rather than via blanket
-X theirs so cumulative append-only files don't get silently truncated.
A tiny Direct2D + DirectComposition Pong hosted in a WinForms Form.
Started life as a one-shot prompt to a local LLM (Qwen 3.6 on an EVO X2
Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 / Radeon 8060S iGPU) and was later refactored from
hand-rolled P/Invoke to CsWin32-generated COM interop. Kept around as a
demo of what a local model can produce on a non-trivial interop task in a
single shot.
Companion demo from the May 2026 Visual Studio Toolbox episode: a WinForms .NET 10 app over the classic Northwind sample database via Entity Framework Core. Ships the EF Core data layer, the WinForms front-end with a startup LocalDB smoke-test, and the actual Copilot prompts used during the episode so the build-up is reproducible.