They can
provide improvements in efficiency, reduce complexity, and add prebaked features so you
don??™t have to code them yourself; but they can??™t remove the fundamental limitations of a system
component that was designed more than a decade ago.
nNote The basic division of labor between User32 and GDI/GDI+ was introduced more than 15 years ago
and was well established in Windows 3.0. Of course, User32 was simply User at that point, because software
hadn??™t yet entered the 32-bit world.
1
C H A P T E R 1
DirectX: The New Graphics Engine
Microsoft created one way around the limitations of the User32 and GDI/GDI+ libraries:
DirectX. DirectX began as a cobbled-together, error-prone toolkit for creating games on the
Windows platform. Its design mandate was speed, and so Microsoft worked closely with video
card vendors to give DirectX the hardware acceleration needed for complex textures, special
effects such as partial transparency, and three-dimensional graphics.
Over the years since it was first introduced (shortly after Windows 95), DirectX has
matured. It??™s now an integral part of Windows, with support for all modern video cards.
However, the programming API for DirectX still reflects its roots as a game developer??™s toolkit.
Because of its raw complexity, DirectX is almost never used in traditional types of Windows
applications (such as business software).
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