MSDN Webcasts on 3D and 2D Game Development in Managed DirectX

I love Managed DirectX.  I thought I was going to stop loving it as Windows Presentation Foundation fermented, but I love it just the same now.

WPF - Avalon - is not a games engine.  Avalon is about ease-of-use.  About abstracting you away from hard stuff.  About opening new worlds of integrated graphics and visualization to developers who don't want to understand the dark arts of graphics.

Managed DirectX is about power.  It's about hitting the sweet spot.  The Lagrangian point, if you will, between performance (approx. 98% of the speed of a C++ DirectX application) and ease of development (usually about 50% of the code of the equivalent C++ app, plus managed memory, your .NET language of choice, the Visual Studio 2005 experience, and so on). 

If you want to write games that are on the graphical bleeding edge, which take advantage of concepts like pixel and vertex shaders, you want Managed DirectX.  If you don't know what shaders are, and don't care, you want Avalon.

Check out these MSDN Webcasts, which cover both 2D and 3D game development.  They're being billed as a fun way to learn how to develop managed code in C#.  Too right!

And as always, The Z Buffer is an amazing Managed DirectX resource.  And Tom Miller's blog.