Bloomifier

I spent some time working out an idea that randomly popped into my head. I thought: XNA runs in windows forms, is it possible to add some Windows functionality to the XNA window? Turns out it was!

By just adding some simple form code in XNA, you can treat the window as a form. Which of course lead to some fun ideas to work out. My idea: Drag & Drop a picture into the XNA window, then load it as Texture2D. After we have succesfully retrieved this texture we can add some bloom to make it interesting.

Here is the (simple) code to get the FormHandle and allow for files to be dropped into the screen:

form = Form.FromHandle(Window.Handle) as Form;

if (form == null)
{
throw new InvalidOperationException("Unable to get underlying Form.");
}

// We must set AllowDrop to true in order to let Windows know that we're accepting drag and drop input
form.AllowDrop = true;
form.DragEnter += new System.Windows.Forms.DragEventHandler(form_DragEnter);
form.DragOver += new System.Windows.Forms.DragEventHandler(form_DragOver);
form.DragDrop += new System.Windows.Forms.DragEventHandler(form_DragDrop);

Of course you still need to define these functions DragEnter, DragOver and DragDrop yourself.

Once I had this, I added a little bloom effect and combined this with the original. The result was pretty cool:



Here's the link: Bloomifier. To succesfully run this on any Windows system, you need the XNA redistributable: XNA