Accessing System Resources

This chapter discusses the seventh iteration of the project, in which we integrate unmanaged code into the photo editor application. Although .NET assemblies are usually easier to build, deploy, and maintain, there are valid reasons to invoke unmanaged code from a .NET application:

• It lets you use legacy components as building blocks for new applications.
• It improves execution speed of certain algorithms, a critical consideration.
• It gives you access to system resources or libraries that are not exposed through the .NET Framework.

This chapter demonstrates the latter case: the integration of a new feature based on OpenGL rendering functions.

This chapter continues the construction phase, and the goal is the successful implementation of the requirement F:image_3dtext and its unit test. Again, the go/no-go criterion is based on the unit test result.