We are very excited to announce the DirectCompute Lecture Series, which starts today, June 14th, and runs for the next three weeks. A component of DirectX, DirectCompute is Microsoft’s GPGPU programming solution that enables developers to utilize...

Surface Sharing Support for Windows Graphics Applications Whitepaper and Samples A whitepaper and two samples were published to showcase interoperability support using surface sharing between Windows graphics APIs: Direct3D 11, Direct2D, Direct3D...

One of the more interesting aspects of Direct2D is that it cooperates with another API, DirectWrite in order to handle text. This is unlike other monolithic APIs, such as GDI, GDI+ or WPF. This post explores why these components are separated in this...

Introduction In this post, I present a sample animation framework that demonstrates how Direct2D and DirectWrite can be used in a wide variety of applications. This post is targeted at game developers and demoscene coders who want to take advantage...

PDC this year had two sessions on DirectX technologies. If you attended them: thank you! For those who weren’t able to attend, the good news is that the sessions are now available online for viewing. “ Advanced Graphics Functionality Using DirectX...

Today, the Internet Explorer (IE) team announced they will be using DirectWrite and Direct2D for IE9! Channel 9 takes us through to the halls of IE team, and shows a sneak peek at what they have in store for IE9 . Update: check out the IE team blog...

Developers using the ID2D1Bitmap::CopyFromBitmap and ID2D1Bitmap::CopyFromRenderTarget APIs may notice problems when the source and destination rectangles are of different sizes. In particular, the source rectangle is incorrectly clipped against the destination...

What is it? Windows Imaging Component (WIC) API enables applications to work with all common image formats. It allows developers to not have to understand intricate details of the image formats they work with. WIC has built-in support for popular formats...

Just like Direct3D 10, Direct2D was designed to fit hand in glove with an optional debug layer that allows developers to receive rich information about design-time issues they might encounter when using Direct2D. Today, the Direct2D team is happy to announce...

The Platform Update for Windows Vista, which is in mentioned in a previous post , just had its final release! Find out more at the Windows Team Blog .

This post will give readers insight into the GPU device driver distribution process in the Windows PC Ecosystem. Four driver distribution channels are outlined: Inbox, IHV, OEM, and Windows Update (WU). Future posts in this series will discuss driver migration from Vista -> Windows 7, hardware support for the various WDDM driver models and DirectX version levels, and how these differences affect DirectX developers....

Today I am pleased to announce the new DirectX MSDN Developer Center . This new site is a complete overhaul of the developer center to make it easier for developers to find the content they are looking for. Using this new site, we hope to provide the...

Direct2D and GDI are both immediate mode 2D rendering APIs and both offer some degree of hardware acceleration. This tends to cause some confusion – Why are these APIs different? How are they similar? Does Direct2D make GDI faster? How is Direct2D hardware...

If developers are using the debug version of D3D9 runtime d3d9d.dll from March 2009 DirectX SDK, they may notice compilation or runtime errors when developing on Windows 7 RTM. There is a binary mismatch between d3d9d.dll from March 2009 DirectX SDK...

Some server applications need to render for scenarios like charting and sending back the generated bitmaps to users connected through web clients. During the planning of Direct2D, we decided to put the support of this scenario as one of our design goals...

Today on the Windows Team Blog we announced the Platform Update for Windows Vista . This is a set of runtime libraries that makes it easy for developers to target both Windows 7 and Windows Vista. I am very pleased to tell you that the Platform Update...

There are many different graphics technologies in Windows, and with Windows 7 we are adding to that collection with new technologies such as Direct2D and DirectWrite. Additionally, technologies such as GDI and GDI+ continue to be used in Windows software...

The latest alpha build of Paint.NET v3.5 is using DirectWrite instead of GDI for the Text tool if you are running Windows 7. More details and a pointer to download Paint.NET v3.5 that uses DirectWrite is available here . Paint.NET is a graphics...

For applications developed using the .NET framework, there is now a way to leverage the Windows 7 DirectX APIs (Direct3D10, Direct2D, DirectWrite, WIC and Direct3D 11) from your managed applications. The Windows API Code Pack is now available on MSDN...

Channel 9 offers another medium for sharing information about the Windows technologies in a developer to developer conversation format. The videos on Channel 9 are designed to provide you additional insights into the DirectX APIs (and other Windows technologies...

How does Direct2D know the "best" size of texture to use for the current video card? In the future, if new cards are released that have improved performance charateristics with larger textures, how will Direct2D scale upwards? Direct2D is a very policy...

MSDN has just published a new article about Direct2D on its web site. The article is written by Kenny Kerr and features some insights from Direct2D team member Mark Lawrence. You can check it out here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861344...

If you're working on porting a project from Windows 7 Beta to work with the Windows 7 Release Candidate, there are a handful of breaking changes in Direct2D and DirectWrite that you'll need to be aware of. We've documented these changes on MSDN for reference...

In Windows 7 we have invested heavily in building a new 2D drawing API in the DirectX family called Direct2D. This API was developed to fill several holes in our Windows graphics platform. One of the most important things to rectify was the lack of hardware...

Welcome to the DirectX blog! Today Windows supports a number of APIs such as GDI, GDI+, D3D etc. that often provide overlapping graphics functionality. When we started working on Windows 7, one of our goals was to rationalize our graphics APIs and at...