Windows Phone 8 devices support Direct3D 11.1 feature level 9.3, but our emulator uses the WARP rasterizer, which can handle all the way up to feature level 11. This means that, if you aren't careful, it is possible to accidentally use more advanced D3D features while developing in the emulator, o…

Inspired by long standing XNA team tradition, the Windows Phone graphics team recently spent some time using our product and trying to build some apps. One of our goals in supporting native C++ was to make it easier to port existing software and frameworks to the platform, so I thought, what is th…

I suspect this will come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to what I've been working on recently...
The latest version of DirectXTK adds support for Windows Phone 8. In fact, DirectXTK pretty much already worked on WP8, which uses the same D3D11 API as Windows 8. The only chan…

The developer SDK for Windows Phone 8 (codename Apollo) is now available for download from an internet near you. Which means I can finally talk about what I've been working on this past year! I am dev lead for graphics, so I'll probably have most to say about that area, but knowing me I'm sure I'…

The latest version of DirectXTK adds a PrimitiveBatch helper, for easily and efficiently drawing dynamically generated geometry such as lines or triangles. This fills the same role as the legacy D3D9 APIs DrawPrimitiveUP and DrawIndexedPrimitiveUP. PrimitiveBatch manages the vertex and index buff…

The DirectX Tool Kit has been updated with two new features:

• Added a ScreenGrab module for easily saving rendertarget contents into .dds or other image formats
  
• Extended GeometricPrimitive.h with a new CreateGeoSphere method (thanks to my colleague Adrian Tsai for contributing this code!)
  
  There ar…

Lots of people asking for samples for the DirectX Tool Kit - sorry I haven't had a chance to work on such a thing yet (I'm kinda busy right now getting Windows Phone 8 finished :-)
Would appreciate feedback on what platform you most want to see samples for (Win8 Metro? Classic Desktop?) and which…

DirectX Tool Kit (aka DirectXTK) is a collection of helper classes for writing Direct3D 11 code for Metro style apps, Windows 8 Desktop, and Windows 7 'classic' applications in C++.
Features:

• SpriteBatch - simple & efficient 2D sprite rendering
  
• SpriteFont - bitmap based text rendering
  
• Effects -…

The DirectX Tool Kit (DirectXTK) has been updated with the addition of a SpriteFont implementation, similar to the one in XNA.
Get it here: DirectXTK.zip
Shamelessly plagiarizing the readme file:
This is a native D3D11 implementation of a bitmap font renderer, similar to the SpriteFont type from…

I often find myself writing little throwaway utilities to help with other tasks, and many of these utilities need to parse command lines. There are myriad ways to do this in C#, ranging from the quick and dirty to the infinitely flexible and confusing. The middle ground approach shown here is not…