I’ve always been fascinated by the Mandelbrot set. It’s an intriguing set, and the fractals created are truly mind boggling. (for more information on the Mandelbrot, and other such sets, you can start with the above Wikipedia link).

As part of my preparation for tomorrow’s session on C# 5.0 asynchronous programming, I’ve decided to create a WPF application to view and explore the Mandelbrot set, while taking advantage of those new asynchronous features. This turned out to be rather fun. Here’s the initial output:

Now you can mark a rectangular are to zoom in:

and the result:

And a few more zoomed in images:

This is simply fun!

Note that to compile the code you would need Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 and the latest Async CTP (3) installed.

As an aside, the calculations use the relatively new Complex type introduced in .NET 4.

Happy zooming, and (maybe) see you tomorrow!