3D Pipes in Direct3D 10 - Part 1

Right, so I'm finally kicking off this project. It's already spent enough time as doodles on my pad of paper so I think it's only fair that I actually do something about it [grin]

The first step was to sort out my development environment. New software:

• Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1
  I downloaded the Windows Vista update only to find that you actually need the full SP1 and then the Vista update. Re-reading the documentation does reveal this, but its hardly clear. Maybe the 470mb SP1 versus the 30mb Vista update was the real clue...
  
  
• April 2007 DirectX SDK
  I stuck with the December 2006 SDK whilst I was finishing off the book. No need to throw things into disarray by changing tools mid-way through a project!
  
  
• Latest Nvidia drivers
  Vista's DWM keeps falling over with their drivers, so I've got the latest ones in the hope they're stable enough to develop against. Version 158.24 now - only 6 builds (or minor revisions?) up from the previous ones so I'm not expecting much...
  

With the software installed and updated the next task was to start work on the actual code template.

I think I'm going to play around with codeplex given that anything I create for this project will be freely available to the community. I'll probably write it up as some sort of tutorial or article for whomever wants to host it...

You have to choose a license for your codeplex projects, so I went with Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL). I don't really know much about the open-source licenses beyond the fact that I am distrustful of anything related to Richard Stallman and the FSF [lol]. From the looks of the Ms-CL license it covers what I'd want from any sort of sample/tutorial - although the "you must provide any recipient with a copy of the code" might be overkill...