This will likely be my last post on the subject of the major changes coming in SlimDX 2 for a little while. My last few posts have focused on issues we’re fairly certain will be relevant to the new API (as will this post) — but we don’t have everything planned out yet. We have a few ideas we’d like to experiment with, but we’re going to have to take some time to prototype them and mess around before we can commit to any one solution. Indeed, there are even a few unanswered questions about the topic I’m going to talk about today.

That topic is how we’re not going to use IDisposable any longer. →

Today is March 24th: Ada Lovelace Day. I first heard about this event last year, via a co-worker’s blog, but it was too late at the time for me to come up with a contribution myself. As it stands, I almost missed this year, too! →

Shawn Hargreaves has been writing about the upcoming changes in XNA 4.0 (interesting stuff). The topic is obviously one that resonates with me given my own recent posts. →

SlimDX 1 is contained in a single, monolithic C++/CLI assembly. SlimDX 2 is structured differently: it is split up into both public and private DLLs. The public DLL, which will be directly referenced by client code, is written in C# and contains the definitions for all the interfaces, enumerations, et cetera. The private DLL, written in C++/CLI, contains the interface implementations and all our internal machinery. →

One of the biggest changes we’re going to make in SlimDX 2 concerns our use of interface types (specifically, our lack thereof). In the current version of SlimDX, the API consists almost entirely of concrete classes. However, there are advantages to exposing interfaces instead — improved testability of the public API and code depending on it, for example, as well as the potential for some back-end improvements to code health. There are two major main concerns involved in redesigning SlimDX to use interfaces: →