Welcome to Stratos!
The following sections describe new and enhanced tools for working with 2D and 3D graphics and game development in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.Asset Viewers and EditorsImage and texture editing. Create, inspect, and edit 32-bit compressed images (PNG, JPG, TIFF) and the DirectDraw Surface texture format with a new image editor. The new editor adds support for alpha transparency and textures with mipmaps. For more information, see Working with images and textures.3D models. Inspect standard 3D model formats (OBJ and Autodesk’s FBX) directly in Visual Studio in order to improve the workflow from artist to developer in a modern content production pipeline. Create basic shapes as placeholder art when prototyping 3D games and applications. For more information, see Working with 3-D models.DirectX Programmable Shaders (HLSL)Edit and build support for HLSL. Add and compile any kind of HLSL shader in Visual C++ projects with automatic MSBuild support for the Microsoft HLSL Compiler (fxc.exe). Edit HLSL code more easily with syntax coloring, indenting, and outlining.Visual Shader designer. Create advanced pixel shaders using a node-based shader graph designer. The designer provides a full 3D preview of the visual effect at every stage and exports the result as HLSL. For more information, see Working with effects.DirectX Graphics DebuggerThe DirectX Graphics Debugger is a powerful way to debug Direct3D applications. This tool can take a snapshot of a running application, store the Direct3D calls and associated data for a single frame, and recreate the frame step-by-step. This enables you to see the intermediate contents of various buffers and devices, debug individual vertices and pixels, and see which graphics function call takes the most processing time. For more information, see Debugging DirectX Graphics.