development adventures

VMWare Fusion WPF issues

I wrote about a WPF problem i had in an earlier post.When i installed a new Virtual Machine with XP SP2 and VS2008, i encountered the same problem. So i realized that this just couldn’t be a Microsoft related issue. I realized that this behavior started when i enabled DirectX support in VMWare Fusion (Yes, i admit. I’m a .NET developer working on a Macbook Pro with OS X 10.5)

I know that VMWare Fusion didn’t support Aero in their first version, but as Vista works perfectly in my VM (with DirectX support enabled) i didn’t thought of this being an issue.

When i turned off DirectX support for my Virtual Machines, WPF worked as expected….Ticket closed.

Update: This post was originally targeted at VMWare Fusion 1.1. I recently tested their 2.0 release and it seems that VMWare has fixed some the problems when displaying WPF Applications. However, (at least on XP SP2) when using normal wpf applications (no excessive 3D stuff) it feels somewhat slower and has more delays compared to software-only rendering in Vmware fusion 1.1. And some of my applications just show empty windows when 3D acceleration is turned off. Conclusion: VMWare Fusion is still a mess for WPF developers.

The only solution that works for me so far is disabling hardware rendering for all WPF apps (as it is slow when 3d support is enabled and NOT USABLE when 3d support is disabled withing vmware fusion.).
To disable hardware rendering create (or modify) the following registry Dword:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration

and set it to 1 to disable.