WPF hardware acceleration dies under VMWare

Just as a note since this comes up a lot from designers who use Macs and are getting into Silverlight / Expression Blend – if you are trying to use VMWare Fusion or Parallels and are coming up with weird graphics glitches or black screens while trying to use Blend, it is because WPF doesn’t get along well with these products’ graphics virtualization (I imagine because both products are focused on gaming / full-screen graphics).

WPF can be forced to run under Software-only rendering however, which clears all of these glitches up (and for Blend, doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on its usability). To do this, check out this MSDN page – you’ll need to open up the Registry Editor (regedit.exe), find the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft key, create a new folder called Avalon.Graphics, then in that folder, create a new DWORD value called DisableHWAcceleration and set its value to 1. Close Blend and restart it, and everything should work now