How to develop a DirectX application in C#?

Question

I have Visual Studio 2015, however I can't find any information about how do I start one, because there's nothing about the dependencies.

Seriously, how can I include the Microsoft.DirectX namespace? To my knowledge, the DirectX SDK is obsolete and its included in the Windows SDK, but even after installing it I couldn't find anything, and there's nothing about it on MSDN.

Do you explicitly need DirectX or is XNA what you're actually looking for? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203894.aspx — Mark, Feb 10 '16 at 01:15

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 09 '16 at 23:49

The legacy Managed DirectX 1.1 assemblies are not officially compatible with .NET 4.x. They only work with .NET 2.0 Runtimes which means VS 2010 or earlier.

In any case, don't use these as they are ancient and haven't been updated in ages. Instead use something like SlimDX or SharpDX.

See DirectX and .NET

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 10 '16 at 01:32

SharpDX is your best bet. it is a C# wrapper of DirectX. You can install it from NuGet. Monogame as mentioned is an open source implementation of XNA that uses SharpDX on the backend.

If you do decide to do that download Monogame from source and compile it against the SharpDX NuGet packages. Monogame uses an old version of SharpDX, so building the source allows you to use the latest version. Not to mention that the officially released version of Monogame is usually a good bit behind their latest development branch

How to develop a DirectX application in C#?

2 Answers2