This post is a follow-up post to my first post.

I purchased a copy of Visual Studio 2005--business expense--to try my hand on porting my existing game forward so I could start my experiment with DirectX. However, this journey has led me into more murky waters. Now, I'm dealing with the following issues:

Tutorials
I'm running into problems with online tutorials not working in 2005. It appears that there are just enough differences between .Net Framework 1.1 (version 7?) and .Net Framework 2.0 (version 8?) that many tutorials don't seem to work. You can download the source. Visual Studio's conversion wizard will handle some of the source, but there is usually always at least one thing wrong--mostly tied to method calls that don't belong to that particular class. Since I'm trying to cut my teeth in these languages, I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing someone syntax-wise, library/reference-wise, or...? This question leads me into the next section.

DirectX
What version of DirectX should I try and will work with the 2005 languages (version 8?)? I have a copy of DX 7.0a, 8.1, and 9.0c (latest?). Since I don't have any foreknowledge of DX, I've been trying to use online tutorials--including Jacob Roman's stuff--and I don't know if things are blowing up because I don't have DX setup properly or the conversion wizard didn't handle it properly. Also, which version should I try to be bashing on my head? Indie Game Dev sites--along with a few sites visited by the Pros--seem to suggest sticking with DX 7 or 8 because of its stability and widest coverage. There is some advanced stuff in DX 9 that aren't widely installed in a given user base (Shaders especially). For what my game does/need--namely 2D graphics, tile engine, input, and sound for now--DX 7 would be fine, but getting it to work with 2005/Framework 2.0 is rather murky too. They would need to download install Framework 2.0 on top of my game to get it work to be the first on the list. These questions lead me into my final area.

Engines
Should I just say "Screw it! " and invest time/energy into an existing technology/game engine and go with it from there. I would keep VS 2005 for learning C# and VB.Net for business environment and future contracts, but not for my hobby development. I've spent all weekend looking into total packages like BlitzMax, Torque Game Builder, SpriteCraft among others. There are also frameworks I could try like PopCap's framework, PTK, Haaf, and pyGame, but these sources seem to relay heavily on C++. I've also run into problems getting code that is easy to use in 2005. It appears that the majority of the Big Dogs are giving 2005 time to get on the market and time for the engine makers to roll out, but that takes time and energy that the Big Dogs would rather not use on infrastructure and focus on their revenue areas--game development.

Ending
TGB looks good & sounds good, but for what I want, it is helluva overkill. It is cheap, but its learning curve is "Whoa!" sharp. VERGE is primarily a (SNES) RPG engine that could work, but it isn't really geared towards strategy development from what I can see in its list of tech demos. BlitzMax could definitely work--haven't touched it since the Blitz2D days--but I'm looking at dropping additional cash to get it to do what I was doing in VB 6.0 before I started hitting bumps.

Anyone mind investing some time and energy to help me ensure I'm asking the right questions and evaluating the right options?