Please note that some IDEs will need to be installed first before installing the Windows 10 SDK. Once you have the IDE and the SDK installed you can now setup your IDE to work with the Windows 10 SDK so that you can write DirectX 11 applications. You will find the Direct3D 11 Programming Guide there which has all the DirectX 11 documentation as well as some example code. The documentation for the Windows 10 SDK is all on the Windows Dev Center website as well. Otherwise you can download the Windows Standalone SDK for Windows 10 from Windows Dev Center (msdn) website.Īfter downloading and installing the SDK you will have the files necessary to compile DirectX 11 programs. If you installed Visual Studio 2015 then the SDK was already installed with it. The Windows 10 SDK contains all of the DirectX 11 headers, libraries, DLLs, and so forth that you will need to write DirectX 11 applications.
The second tool you will need is the Windows 10 SDK.
When you install Visual Studio 2015 make sure to choose custom and select all so that the Visual C++ components are all installed, otherwise it sets it up primarily for C# development. You can download Visual Studio 2015 Community from the Visual Studio website. I personally use Visual Studio 2015 Community because it is free and is an excellent IDE. I'll leave that up to you to decide which one you prefer. There are several others available and some are free off the net. The one I use and will be supplying project files for is Visual Studio 2015. The first of these tools is a compiler that is preferably built into a nice IDE.
Tutorial 1: Setting up DirectX 11 with Visual Studioīefore writing any graphics code we'll need to have the tools to do so.