The Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate (formerly known as “Visual Studio 11”) is now available including all editions: Express, Professional, Premium, and Ultimate. See the Visual Studio blog entry for more information. As with the Visual...

The Windows 8 Release Preview is now available. It includes numerous improvements as discussed on the Building Windows 8 blog , the RC version of the DirectX 11.1 Runtime, and for game developers and publishers it includes some important updates to the...

With the transition of the DirectX SDK to the Windows SDK (see Where is the DirectX SDK? ), and the Windows SDK samples now being hosted online on MSDN's Code Gallery , I've begun the process of cleaning up older DirectX SDK samples and posting them directly...

With the inclusion of XAudio2 in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview , there's been renewed interest in learning how to use this API. The documentation on MSDN is of course a great place to start, and be sure to read through the entire Programmer's Guide as...

With the retirement of D3DX (See “ Where is the DirectX SDK? ”), there is some confusion about how applications access the High-Level Shader Language ( HLSL ) compiler. As mentioned in an earlier post (See “ What’s up with D3DCompiler_xx...

Creating and loading textures There are a number of previous posts on the state of .DDS files which is the container format for Direct3D resources (see MSDN for some basics). The DDS File Format Lives DDS Update and 10:10:10:2 Problems DDSWithoutD3DX...

In an earlier post , I covered how to use XInput with the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. In this post, I'll discuss how to make use of headset audio for the Xbox 360 Common Controller. Update: This advice also applies to the Windows 8 Release...

The DirectX SDK (June 2010) release includes a little utility header, XDSP.H . This contains CPU-based functions for computing the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) as well as some related multi-channel audio interleave/deinterleave functionality primarily...

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview includes version 1.4 of the XInput API for use with Xbox 360 Common Controller compatible game devices, and this API is fully supported for both Metro style apps (including x86, x64, and Windows on ARM) and desktop Win32...

DirectX SDK (June 2010) includes the Samples Content Exporter utility for creating .sdkmesh data files using Autodesk's FBX SDK library. At the time, this utility used the 2010.2 version of the Autodesk FBX SDK which did not have support for Visual Studio...

One of the little utility libraries in the DirectX SDK is a static library for converting HRESULTs to text strings for debugging and diagnostics known as DXERR.LIB . There were once even older versions of this library, DXERR8.LIB and DXERR9.LIB , but...

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview includes version 2.8 of the XAudio2 game audio API built in, and this API is fully supported for both Metro style apps (including x86, x64, and Windows on ARM) and desktop Win32 applications. The full details of the differences...

Slides and recorded audio for the Microsoft presentations at GDC 2012 are now available on Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft Developer Day Windows 8 Creating a Great Metro Style Game for Windows 8 Developing Metro Style Games on the...

The Windows SDK for Windows 8 Consumer Preview (included with Visual Studio 11 Beta ) ships with the DirectXMath library which is the next major revision of the C++ SIMD graphics math library known as “XNAMath” in the DirectX SDK and Xbox...

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is now available along with Beta releases of Visual Studio 11 and the new Windows SDK . Update: This advice also applies to the Windows 8 Release Preview and Visual Studio 2012 RC . Developers working on games for...

The DirectX SDK is now part of the Windows SDK. The new Windows SDK is where you’ll find DirectX 11.1 , Direct2D , DirectWrite , DXGI 1.2 , WDDM 1.2 , DirectXMath , Feature Level 11.1 devices , XINPUT 1.4 , XAUDIO 2.8 , the "Developer Runtime" ...

The DirectXTex library does an excellent job of providing all the 'texture content processing' functionality from the venerable D3DX library (see " Where is the DirectX SDK? "), and DirectXMath (or the older XNAMath ) takes over for D3DXMath. Shawn Hargreaves...

The Visual Studio 11 Beta release is now live. For an overview of the new product, take a moment to read this Visual Studio blog entry as well as an entry on the Visual C++ blog . This Beta release includes the full range of SKUs including Express , Professional...

Over the past few month we've been getting reports of problems with the DirectX SDK (June 2010) setup failing for customers displaying an installation error when it gets to point of installing the "redistributable packages". This particular problem has...

The Beta is now available, so should be used instead of the older Developer Preview mentioned here. The next version of Visual Studio is currently available for download as a Developer Preview. This release includes a new C++ compiler and Standard...

The presentations for the Gamefest 2011 conference are now available on Microsoft downloads . Here are the main talks of interest to Windows developers. Note: As mentioned during the Gamefest conference keynote, content related to the next version...

Over the past few years at game conferences we've talked a lot about the Xbox LIVE service and the many great oppourtunities on Xbox 360, Windows , and Windows Phone using it. What we've talked less about in these venues are best practices for those writing...

This is the sample package for Matt Lee's Gamefest 2011 presentation Tiled Resources for Xbox 360 and Direct3D 11 ( US / UK ). See the documentation files in the package for more details. Note: This sample includes a copy of both DirectXTex and the...

As part of my Gamefest 2011 presentation Modern Texture Content Pipelines ( US / UK ), I demonstrated the "DirectXTex" library which is a shared source implementation of DDS file I/O (including the "DX10" header extension), texture content processing...

So you've downloaded the latest DirectX SDK* and start digging through the various tutorials, samples, and documentation , and you are trying to get a handle on where to start learning Direct3D 11... The best place to start is to learn Direct3D 10...