One of the things I want to try out in this project is a better wrapper around COM interfaces. Previously, each interface had its own wrapper class which handled creation of the associated object, as well as destruction. This was a bit difficult to work with though, and caused the code to look like "m_dev->m_dev->Present()".
The new wrapper I am going to try out will be generic by way of a template. One really nice thing about this new design is that I will be able to pass the wrapper directly to a function which is expecting a normal COM interface pointer. This will be done by overloading the address-of operator to return the address of the interface pointer being wrapped. With the old design I had to make such calls inside of the wrapper, which lead to some really rigid code.
Another thing I will be looking into is hooking the window to process input messages separate from the windowing code. I have never liked having the WM_KEYDOWN message processing inside of the window manager.
Reposted from http://invisiblegdev.blogspot.com/