High Level Shader Language in XNA Game Studio 4.0

The High Level Shader Language (HLSL) is the language used to talk directly to the machine's graphics card / Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). It is like C in syntax and has a couple of nuances. We will discuss how to pass data from your game to the shader. We will discuss both Vertex and Pixel Shaders. While this will be in the context of XNA this information will also be valuable to Silverlight and WPF developers that need to understand how Pixel Shaders work. At this time, Windows Phone 7 does not support custom Pixel Shaders but if there is time we will discuss the existing shaders that the XNA Framework team built for the phone.