I'm very confused. I was on a two year hiatus but now im back to learning graphics programming. I know that DirectX is deprecated and I believe that I can find the D3D routines in the Windows SDK. Would that still be the case for windows 7?
If I have to uninstall the 2010 DX SDK and download the new Windows SDK, is there anything else I should do to get it to work?
Thank you.
"DirectX" is not deprecated. The legacy DirectX SDK is deprecated, as is the D3DX11 utility library, XACT tool/audio engine, and the "DirectX End-User Runtime" (aka DXSETUP). This is detailed on MSDN.
The DirectX SDK content needed to build applications is part of the Windows 8.1 SDK, and since you have Visual Studio 2013 you already have it installed. See this blog post. For a list of what was moved, what wasn't moved, and what you should use instead see these four articles:
To learn DirectX 11 developing with Windows 7 with VS 2013, I'd recommend taking a look at the DirectX Tool Kit, Direct3D Win32 Game Visual Studio template, and the DirectX Tool Kit tutorials--the tutorials are still in development, but a lot of materials is there already.
You may also want to look at this post for some notes on various DirectX 11 books.
BTW, the Windows 8.1 SDK that comes with VS 2013 supports writing Windows desktop applications (aka Win32 applications) for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.0, and Windows 8.1. The only 'trick' for targeting these older versions of Windows more easily is to set _WIN32_WINNT appropriately. See Using the Windows Headers. The Direct3D Win32 Game VS template I reference above sets it to support Windows Vista or later in the pch.h:
#include <WinSDKVer.h>
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0600
#include <SDKDDKVer.h>
