2008-09-26
I've decided to finally start dabbling with DirectX 10. The main reason behind it is that I want to work with Geometry Shaders. There is no official C# wrapper around DX10, but I did manage to find two third-party ones. One had not been updated since April 2006, so I threw that one out the window. The other, SlimDX, has been in very active development and a new version was just released this month. I downloaded it and played with some of the samples and was rather impressed. However, SlimDX also provides a wrapper around DX9 and it is very clear that that was the priority of the project. There are quite a few things missing from the DX10 wrapper that would have been very useful.
So, instead of fighting through a third-party C# wrapper, I figured I might as well go back to the straight C++ version. This has the advantage of having tons of official samples and tutorials from Microsoft. However, this has the major disadvantage that I have not worked in C++ directly for almost 4 years. It is rather rough going back to C++ from C#. There were so many helpful things built into C# that aided in rapid development. I mean, C++ doesn't even have a string type, you have to use char arrays. (Edit: I forgot that it does support strings, but you have to include the header for it first. Doh!) I feel like I'm stepping back into the dark ages! :-P
I'm hoping to have just the basic C++ code to draw a model using a shader, and then all of the rest of my work will be in HLSL. We shall see!
(Edit: I found a really helpful C++ tutorial for getting me back up to speed. http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/ )