XNA for CAD & Modeling?

I am looking for feedback on using the XNA framework in a graphics engine for a 3d modeling app. All I ever see when 3D graphics are mentioned is games, games, games! Games are great and obviously drive the 3D market, but I am interested in writing a simple (to start) graphics engine for use in a civil engineering modeling and simulation app. How well will XNA handle lines, line weight, line types Can the XNA framework be used without Game Studio Express I am coding in C# so XNA would seem to be the logical choice rather than OpenGL. Any other feedback on limitation of XNA for this type of use would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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XNA for CAD & Modeling?

Ariel Mazuz
Thanks for the reply. Do you think this is the route to take I want to stick with as much managed code as possible. OpenGL is not managed (right ) and probably never will be. Is MS going to continue to develop Managed DX or is XNA the replacement
mkb137b
OpenGL is not managed, but there are various managed wrappers for it.

Microsoft is still maintaining MDX 1.1, but will probably not be adding any major new functionality to it going forward.

It's really up to you to pick which technology makes most sense for your application. Obviously I have a slight bias here, which makes me the wrong person to ask for impartial advice :-)
Stephen Chiu
While games were obviously our main design focus, it should be feasible to write a modelling app using XNA. You will need to do some fairly low level coding to implement things like dotted lines and different widths of line, because those are not natively supported by D3D, so you will have to emulate them using for instance a texture to achieve dotted lines, and drawing triangles in suitable positions to emulate lines thicker than a pixel. That should all be perfectly possible, though, and to the extent you can manage with just regular single pixel thick lines, the native line primitive type will handle that just fine.

The XNA Framework is a regular managed assembly, so you can use it from any .NET development environment. If you aren't using GSE, you will lose the content pipeline functionality, and lose the ability to deploy to Xbox, but you wouldn't care about that anyway for your scenario.
XNA for CAD & Modeling?

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