Learning DirectX 11 via SlimDX

Personal things...

A while back I picked up Frank Luna's Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11. I've been meaning to start going through it for some time, but some personal things have cut into my programming time significantly. I recently acquired a two year old Australian Cattle dog, and Dixie has kept me on the dead run for the weeks... It's very difficult to muster up the courage to dive into a programming project when you feel half zombified from getting up at 4:30 to let the dog out so she will stop her adorable yet frenzied licking attacks on your fiance.

But today, I'm going to start. I have not dealt with DirectX 11, nor 10 before; it's only in the last year or so that I built myself a modern desktop to replace my badly aging laptop from 2006. I do have some experience playing around with DirectX 9, so it will be interesting to see what has changed.

As I mentioned, I'll be going through Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11 by Frank D. Luna. Atfirst glance, it seems very similar to his previous book, Introduction to 3D Game Programming with Direct X 9.0c: A Shader Approach , which I found to be very well-written, with easy to follow code examples. One wrinkle is that I'm going to be doing this in C#, with SlimDX, rather than in C++ and straight DirectX 11. At my job, I mostly write C#, and have developed a serious fondness for it. Additionally, I've found that attempting to port C++ code over to C# is a somewhat interesting exercise, and not a bad way to learn some of the darker and less-common corners of the C# standard libraries.

I plan on doing a post on each major example. So there may be a couple per chapter, and I don't know what kind of pace my schedule will allow me. If you're interested at looking at my code as I'm going along, you can clone my Git repository at https://github.com/ericrrichards/dx11.git. I'm not going to include the original book code (I couldn't find a license specifically for the code, and I'm struggling to parse the legalese on the inside cover of the book), but you can download it from the book's website at http://www.d3dcoder.net/d3d11.htm.