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...

Over the past few years, I've done a lot of presentations on x64 technology as it pertains to game developers and DirectX technologies. Here is a collection of links for developers interested in learning more about the Windows x64 OS and x64 native programming...

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...

The Beta for the Microsoft Research Kinect for Windows SDK is now available at the project website . Be sure to note that the license for this technology is for non-commercial use only. Update: Microsoft announced that there will be a Kinect for...

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 (including WARP support for feature levels 11.1 and 11.0), and for game developers...

Writing shared code for Windows Store and Win32 desktop apps Introduction Apps written for the Windows Store make use of the Windows Runtime (WinRT) and a restricted subset of Win32 APIs located in the core API family (indicated by WINAPI_FAMILY...

The DirectX SDK (June 2010) release includes updates to the Games for Windows technical articles (v1.4.0010). There were no significant changes to the technical requirements, but this release includes a number of minor clarifications and some notes on...

Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 is now available on Windows Update, MSDN Subscriber Downloads, and TechNet. The announcement from the Windows team can be read on the Windows Team Blog , and one from the server team can be found here...

The DirectXTK and DirectXTex libraries now have official homes on Codeplex. http://directxtk.codeplex.com/ http://directxtex.codeplex.com/ The Codeplex site has the latest release packages, source code revision history with a Team Foundation...

In the DirectX SDK (June 2010) release, the HLSL compiler was updated from the August 2009 version. As part of this update, the HLSL complier now supports a new feature: symbolic derivatives . If you are interested in learning more about what this feature...

One of our areas of focus for the DirectX SDK (June 2010) release was to make sure our samples supported Direct3D 11 hardware from NVIDIA , as we had previously only had AMD/ATI Direct3D 11 hardware to work with. There were a few issues that arose right...

Writing shared code for Windows Store and Win32 desktop apps (continued from part 1 ) Win32 APIs The majority of the “core” API family are new Windows Runtime (WinRT) style APIs which are not available for down-level Win32 desktop...

The DirectX SDK (June 2010) release includes the fixes to the DDSWithoutD3DX and DDSWithoutD3DX11 samples I mentioned in earlier posts. The Programmer's Guide for DDS in the Windows DirectX Graphics documentation was also updated to reflect the latest...

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...

With the inclusion of XAudio2 in Windows 8 , 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 there's lots of great...

There are many version numbers in Windows, and many different ways to obtain and use them. The plethora of ways to get versioning information, and the many different kinds of components involved, has typically resulted in lots of rope for developers to...

The Microsoft presentations from the Game Developer Conference 2011 are now available on the Microsoft Downloads site. There were a number of talks on Windows, Windows phone 7, and Kinect. The presentations of interest to Windows developers are: Windows...

Some users of XNAMath have reported a range problem with the XMVectorFloor and XMVectorCeiling functions with the SSE implementation (i.e. whenever the values are greater than INT_MAX). These fixes will be included in a future release of XNAMath, but...

Over the past year or so, one of my projects has been the XNAMath library which shipped for the first time to Windows developers in the DirectX SDK (March 2008). XNAMath began life back in 2004 as "xboxmath" for the Xbox 360, and was originally developed...

The DirectXMath library provides high-performance linear algebra math support for the typical kinds of operations found in a 3D graphics application. The library achieves this by making use of specialized SIMD (Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data) instruction...

The DirectX Toolkit ( aka DirectXTK) for Direct3D 11 introduced last year and made an official CodePlex project has continued to improve. The DirectXTK project provides 'runtime' utility shared-source C++ code to replace the deprecated D3DX library for...

Visual Studio 2010 launched today. The DirectX SDK team is very excited about this new version because amoung the many improvements and new technologies for this release (upgraded IDE, C++ 0x supprt, .NET Framework 4.0, Concurrency Runtime, etc.) there...

There are a number of new features and some bugs fixed in the Windows Imaging Component for Windows 8 . With the installation of KB 2670838 this new version of WIC is also available on Windows 7 Service Pack 1. The Windows 8.0 SDK contains the latest...

Doing some work on the texconvex tool (the Direct3D 10.x/11 version of the Texture Conversion Tool), I discovered that my use of the NULL render device resulted in garbage output from this tool in some scenarios. This is easily remedied using the WARP...

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...