Replacing BitmapEffect in WPF 4 as they are now obsolete

If you google the net for using visual effects in WPF you are very likely to hit BitmapEffects. Well, bad news, BitmapEffect is obsolete and broken in WPF4. Instead you have Effect. The idea is to write (or download) a custom Effect for the things one would normally do using the slow (but easy to use) BitmapEffects. Also, the BitmapEffectGroup doesn't work anymore and has no alternative in WPF4. Bummer! According to Dr. WPF, the framework will try to automatically translate the older BitmapEffects to the new ones. That applies for BlurBitmapEffect and for DropShadowBitmapEffect with a Noise level of 0, for the others... you are on your own.

There were 5 default BitmapEffect classes in WPF3:

1. BlurBitmapEffect - the WPF4 alternative is BlurEffect
2. OuterGlowBitmapEffect - the WPF4 alternative in the Microsoft article is BlurEffect, but I have found that it can be replaced by DropShadowEffect with ShadowDepth set to 0
3. DropShadowBitmapEffect - the WPF4 alternative is DropShadowEffect
4. BevelBitmapEffect - the WPF4 alternative is a custom class inheriting from Effect.
5. EmbossBitmapEffect - the WPF4 alternative is a custom class inheriting from Effect.

I found this project when googling to a simpler way of building ShaderEffects: WPF ShaderEffect Generator. Also, a discussion about a Bevel ShaderEffect here led me to this WPF shader library, but it's last release date is somewhere in March 2009.