Anyway, the interesting stuff - just finished a conference call with some of the other DirectX MVP's and the DirectX team. Had an hour to cover some general stuff regarding Direct3D 10 and so on...
Given that Vista is due out in Q3 (or thereabouts), development on new stuff is starting to settle down now and importantly for you guys is that this should mean you'll start to see more details emerging.
One of the things that was echoed in this thread was that quite a few people haven't been able to look at D3D10 properly due to the WinVista pre-requisite. I think the DX team were aware of this, but I mentioned it anyway - thus it's probably of interest to you guys that there may well be a resolution to this sometime soon [grin]
It's probably safest for me to not say any more than that as I don't think it's actually finalised yet (please don't shoot me if it doesn't materialize!).
I've got a few things I want to try out with D3D10 - I've drafted them out on paper, but haven't time to actually implement them. I'm particularly interested in looking at the "programmer side" of D3D10 with any sample code I put out. I can rely on various people to put out jaw-dropping graphics demo's (some of the official/SDK ones are amazing), but I want to cover some of the less "wow" parts.
For example, one of the big things I see with D3D10 is that there is lots more information available to/via the shaders. I've got a plan for a little sample that tries to visualize what sort of information is available - PrimitiveID for example.
In other news, I've got my D3D9-based lighting models doing a bit more now. Annoying, and somewhat embarassingly, I've introduced a Z-Fighting issue. This sort of thing gets asked fairly regularly online - and I've answered it several times. Yet for some reason I can't solve it (yet) in my own code [headshake]
I'm guessing such a solution would be in the form of a special reference device that can run on XP? You'd need support of the new Vista driver model to actually use D3D10 hardware on XP, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't have a reference device if you made a few tweaks/hacks under the hood.
Either that or they're bringing out a public beta of Vista, I have read various things saying they're planning on doing so and given their history with the VS CTPs and the WinFX CTP it doesn't seem that unlikely.