Jay Wren told me yesterday about the Windows 7 managed API code pack that Microsoft has released. I spent a little bit of time looking at it today, and I’ve got to say that I’m pretty impressed. It provides interop wrappers around many of the Windows 7 (and some Vista) features, including many of the Shell features (taskbar, file system, Start menu, Recycle bin, etc.). It also provides managed access to many of the DirectX 11 features, which I thought was especially cool.
With the download they provide samples and all of the API code. I dove into the DirectX code, and while I don’t know DirectX thoroughly, there are a lot of functions there. The DirectX sample only shows how to use DXGI (DirectX Graphics Infrastructure, provides access to the low level computer details) to enumerate through computer information such as system memory, monitors, and DirectX support, but it looks like could definitely use it to do anything you would want to do in DirectX.
Microsoft’s blog post about it: here.
