Nick Gravelyn

One thing about my MVP award that always bugged me is that I’m in the category of “XNA/DirectX”. The problem with that is I really don’t know DirectX at all. Sure XNA is a wrapper on top of it and I played around with D3D9 for all of a week or so a while back, but I really don’t know much about it. So I’ve decided to fix that problem.

I started today working on learning Direct3D 10. I decided to jump right in with 10 mainly because I’m not planning on releasing anything for a while (and as such, the widespread support of D3D9 doesn’t matter) and because I want to eventually get to the point of using the fun geometry shaders. Not to mention it should make my transition to 11 easier down the road.

What I hope to do is blog about things as I go so that others who are familiar with XNA but want to expand their horizons can join in on the fun. At this point I have nothing substantial accomplished other than a blank window (don’t even have D3D10 initialized in it yet) so this blog post is nothing more than me wasting some time. I will say that going from C# and Objective-C to C++ is introducing some interesting side effects. In my very first line of code, I went to include the windows.h header and wrote:

#import <windows.h>

As C++ programmers are aware, it should be #include, but sadly Objective-C has trained me to use #import instead. Once that was fixed it wasn’t too hard to get a window up and running after consulting some Win32 tutorials online. Now I have MSDN open to their basic D3D10 tutorials so hopefully I’ll get some graphics by the end of the day. Stay tuned.