Farewell, MDX

Over on Let's Kill Dave, the announcement came that the new DirectX SDK is available for download, along with some additional information. Let's go over the announcements.

1) Shift to quarterly releases. I'm glad about this. Six a year has been a bit much. Hopefully with fewer releases per year, they'll be able to spend more time polishing them.

2) Direct3D 10.1 technical preview. Useless until Vista SP1 beta.

3) XAudio2 beta (going to replace DirectSound). I really like this. The Xbox audio API's rock.

4) XACT session windows. I know a couple of audio designers who are currently spooging over this. I can't speak for it one way or another, but they're loving the idea of it. They'll let me know if it's a major improvement.

5) Unified DX9/DX10 DXUT. I'm all for a supported, unified utility framework.

6) Removals. This is the biggie because this is the last version that will have any of the below. Let's go over the removals one by one.

a) Direct3D 8 and below and DX8-era HRESULT conversion routines. I'm glad for this. DirectX 9.0 is a mature API, and while backwards compatibility will remain part of the operating system, it's time for coders to move on.

b) Direct3D retained mode. Again, same feelings. Direct3D retained mode has been superceded by Windows Presentation Framework anyway.

c) DirectAnimation. This was essentially "DirectX talks to web pages." With support gone in IE7, it's a good removal.

d) DirectMusic. I knew it was coming, but it's still sad to see DirectMusic go. There were a few great usage scenarios for DirectMusic that still aren't directly covered by XACT, DirectSound or XAudio2, but it's a good API that has run its course.

e) DirectInput 7 and below. Microsoft's guidance for the last eighteen months has been to use a combination of XInput and Windows messages instead of DirectInput, and to be honest, while the code may be slightly more complex, it's a bit more stable that way.

f) DirectPlay. While I'd like to see some supported network sample code for WinSock and XSockets (the Games for Windows - LIVE version of WinSock), DirectPlay really ran its course years ago. The last production game that I'm aware of that used DirectPlay was "Microsoft Golf 2001 Edition." (Yes, "Links LS 1998" up through "Microsoft Golf 2001 Edition" used DirectPlay for networking.)

g) DirectPlayVoice. Useless without DirectPlay, so a good cut.

h) Managed DirectX samples and documentation. This is the only cut that pisses me off. I know that XNA is supposed to supplant Managed DirectX, but you'd think they could have at least waited until they had a version of XNA Game Studio that would integrate with all Visual Studio SKU's before killing MDX. Of course, since there were deprecated assemblies for DirectMusic, DirectInput and DirectPlay, I guess it was inevitable given the above.

Regardless, it's a big release so get to downloading.