Report: DirectDraw in Managed DirectX9

[CornedBee]

I took a look into Managed DirectX 9 with C#. I finally (after HOURS) managed to plot some lines via DirectDraw.

I'm not asking any questions here, I'm just reporting what I observed.

The documentation is non-existant. In order to know of what type collections that use the IEnumeration interface are you have to use:

if(en.MoveNext())
  Console.WriteLine(en.Current.GetType().FullNam);

because the docs don't mention of which type the objects actually are.
An example is the devices collection of DirectInput.

This also means that I had many guesses and many exceptions before I found out how to correctly initialize DirectDraw.

Then there is something I consider a bug in the Lock method. It returns a 2d byte array that represents the surface memory. This array has the same dimensions as the surface. This is nice if you are in 256-color mode. But in 16-, 24- or 32-bit modes where each pixel takes more than one byte this suddenly has the strange consequence that you can only access a part of the image!
There is a workaround because you can replace that pointer with one of your own.

The whole thing was awfully slow (with abot 5 fps) but that might have been my (very sloppily programmed) framework. I had to write it myself because the DX app wizard for C# doesn't work.

Tomorrow I'm going to profile my framework and see where it eats the speed. Probably in the allocation of the surface memory every frame...

Good job MS