hplus1203

If it only were that easy. I used to write device drivers for a living -- I know this stuff. Alas, because they don't expose pointers in Managed DirectX, there's all kinds of places in the wrappers that are NOT like in the C++ documentation. As I said above, I think the C++ documentation is just fine in most places. If there was a document that documented the deltas, per interface method, that'd be swell. But, alas, there are some pretty big differences, with no documentation to set you straight other than guesswork. Quite tedious.

Listen: There is no interest of the "pro" game industry to make it _harder_ to make games. The "pro" game industry does not see independent developers as competitors. They are either "farms" for future employees, future potential acquisition targets, or irrelevant. (Most of them are the latter) The more good games that get developed, and the more people who learn the hard art of making quality games, the stronger the games industry is. The easier it becomes to make quality games, the better off everybody is. I agree that releasing Managed DirectX early was a good idea; it came out in 2002. However, the SDK update in october 2003, almost a year later, had not improved the documentation for Managed DirectX at all. I think that's a shame.

Is it just me, or is the timer class that they have in the sample code generated by the DirectX project wizards absolutely frickin' horrible? And isn't it true that they don't even use it right from the other components of the wizard?

The Managed DirectX documentation is horrible to nonexistent (i e, they pre-processed the header files into something that's clickable, but tells you nothing more than the header files would...) The C++ DirectX documentation is very good. For example, if pixel shaders are giving you trouble, I'd start looking at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndrive/html/directx05222002.asp But there's so much that building an autoritative link list would take a long time... Also, the D3D FX stuff makes it very simple to load and apply various shaders. There are several examples in the DirectX 9.0 Summer Update SDK, too, although, alas, some of the best ones are C++ only and not ported (you can still read them for information). Regarding approaches to higher-level constructs, such as scene graphs, etc, then I suggest getting a book. That's all general-purpose programming stuff which really shouldn't be addressed by a low-level device access API. Although Microsoft is trying to build a little bit on top of that with the separate Direct3DX stuff, just for good measure.

What makes you think that any pro gaming companies are using Managed DirectX? I haven't heard of any game starts using it. In fact, I think we're on the early edge when we're currently looking into it for possible tools use. Maybe.