I have a shader, that I might add is working perfectly in XNA1.0 that will not compile in 2.0beta.

It tells me it has too many instructions (72), which is more than the maximum for PS2.0 (64). It doesn't tell me which technique is the one using too many. And if I change out all of the pixel shaders to model 3.0 I get a new error, which is:

GS 2.0 will be using a newer version of the Shader compiler... Shader compilers are fixed by the DirectX SDK GSE 1.0 used October 2006.

GS 2.0 uses ??? November 2007? August 2007?

So the compiler results can be different...however you are right that this is a bug. It should not break so upload the .fx file to connect and say that it worked in 1.0 but not in 2.0

Here is the connect issue.

I'll try release mode and see what happens....

In XNA GS 2.0, Debug builds compile shaders with extra debugging info so you can use PIX to debug them. The side-effect is that you have fewer registers available in Debug.

I'm not terribly familiar with this area, but you'll find it in the docs if you look for it.

Worked great shaw, thanks. I have the engine running on 2.0beta, with the exception of water. I cannot figure out exactly how the render/resolve target system they setup works.

Before we had a renderTarget2D, and a Texture2D. We'd resolve the backbuffer to the rendertarget, and set our texture equal to the rendertarget's texture. However now we must use a resolveTexture2D, which doesn't look like you can extract the texture from it, or I'm sure you can but I can't figure it out cause I'm so tired. Once that is working the entire engine will be running 2.0beta. Without the water performance is up around 30%, but for all I know the 30% improvement could be due to the water....

Yes, if you are building a Debug build, we'll compile the shaders with debug information as well.  To work around this issue for RTM, if we detect the failure in debug, we'll go ahead and build the shader in Release in an attempt to always give you a good build.

As for render targets.  ResolveTexture2D is a dynamic texture that you create as the target for a ResolveBackBuffer.  Likewise it is the texture returned by RenderTarget2D.GetTexture().  There is no need to call ResolveRenderTarget; it's implicitly done for you.  If you are using ResolveBackBuffer, then instead of creating a Texture2D, you'll created a ResolveTexture2D.  You'll need to tweak the parameters a bit, but they should be clearer now.

I think I'm getting closer to getting this work. When you say that you don't need to call ResolveTarget I am confused. In the bloom sample you guys call Device.ResolveBackBuffer(). Then after rendering call Device.SetRenderTarget.

Basically I need to save the buffer to a Texture2D to pass to my shader. I cannot get a Texture2D from the ResolveTexture2D or RenderTexture2D that I can tell.