RE: [Openexr-devel] Exr.NET

[wcoles]

Hi again,
        Well, I managed to get it working, loading and displaying exr images
using my wrapper :)

A few issues in the managed->C++ interop though, the SetFrameBuffer call
expects the target address to be offset. So that when ReadPixels is called,
the scan line offset within the frame buffer is computed and added to the
original address.

Whilst this is fine for C++, C# (and managed code in general) doesn't like
you fiddling with raw pointers. It's possible (in C#) but the code has to be
flagged as 'unsafe' which means you can't make use of the security features
provided with the .NET framework.

Also, there doesn't appear to be any API methods to iterate through the
attributes or determine their type. And it seems the C API only supports
'Half' pixels (ie. using the Half data type).

So, after some thinking. I've decided instead to port much of the IlmImf.dll
to native C#, which is a lot of work. But there are some things I'm doing I
*really* want exr support for :) Are there any [legal] issues with such an
approach? I shall still make it open source using the same license as
OpenExr itself. Much of the code so far is a direct C++ -> C# port
(currently working on the Huffman decompressor) and I'm trying to keep the
class hierarchy close to the C++ files.

Should I use the same file\license header as the C++ files? That contains
ILM's name, should that be removed or can it be kept? I thought of renaming
the project to OpenExr.NET so I could use the namespace "OpenExr" (the
current 'ExrDotNet' namespace is a bit clunky :), is that an issue?

My current roadmap is to first get PIZ compressed files loading and
displaying (as most exr files seem to use that format), then add support for
other compression schemes followed by support for writing out files.

Actually, I'm not sure if this is the correct mailing list for this post
sorry, perhaps I should mail OpenExr-Users?

Thanks,
Wayney