Your DirectX 9 Playground

There's a useful feature added to Visual Studio.NET supplied by the DirectX 9 SDK: The DirectX 9 Visual C++ Wizard. It creates a framework for building DirectX 9 projects. As you read this chapter and the next one, you can cut and paste the code examples into your playground project and see how they work for yourself. To create the playground project, follow these steps:

• Open Visual Studio.NET and select File, New Project.

• Select Visual C++ Projects in the left pane listing project types.

• Find DirectX 9 Visual C++ Project Wizard and select it.

• Choose a good name and location for your new project, and hit the OK button.

• Clear the DirectInput support if you want to grab WM_CHAR messages—that's an easy place to install bits of test code. Otherwise, you'll need to learn a little DirectInput, and then you'll be on your own!

• Hit Finish and create your project.

If you choose "Playground" as the name of your project you'll find the main entry point in Playground.cpp, which is where you'll plug in most of your test code.