Dimi Grigoriadis

I love console applications. They give you the good old DOS feeling and I’m a nostalgic guy. Now while developing a DirectX application I found it more useful to use a GUI frontend with Microsoft’s shader compiler fxc.exe, the compiler which ships with the DirectX SDK. And since I’m a good guy, I share it with you. I know that many developers love console applications like me and the handling and using of fxc is quite good. No complicated syntax, no complicated anything. But I also know that newbies in game programming would most probably prefer a GUI for this. I was trying to compile about 10 shaders yesterday evening and I was too lazy to type the filenames so I took the time to create a GUI app with C# so I could “click” me through.

The app might contain bugs. If you find some please drop me a note. It was created in short time and quick and dirty. It’s only intend was to help me compile some hlsl files without having to type that much.

How to use it: There is not much to say. To compile or preprocess your hlsl files follow these steps:

1. select input file in dialog
2. select target profile in output file section
3. select compile options in the options section
4. click compile and watch the debug output

All messages by fxc are written to the textbox on the bottom of the application. Note that output files will be written to the same directory where the input file resides, not to the application directory.

As I said, I developed the GUI using C# and instead of making a click-once application I thought it would be a good idea of using InstallShield Limited Edition project which ships with VS 2010. Sorry for that but I haven’t used it yet and wanted to see how it feels 🙂

You will need at least .NET framework 2.0 and DirectX redist runtime installed on your system. Those components are not included with the installer.

Download: setup-fxcGui