Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB .NET

BACK A FEW YEARS AGO I HAD AN IDEA. What if I could make the power of the DirectX API available to the developers who were going to be using the new set of languages and common language runtime that Microsoft was developing? The idea was intriguing, and opening up a larger portion of the world to DirectX was a goal I was only happy to endorse. - Besides, what developer doesn't want to write games? It seems that at least once a week I am answering questions directly regard- ing the performance of managed code, and Managed DirectX in particular. One of the more common questions I hear is some paraphrase of "Is it as fast as unmanaged code?" Obviously in a general sense it isn't. Regardless of the quality of the Managed DirectXAPI, the fact remains that it still has to run through the same DirectXAPI that the unmanaged code does. There is naturally going to be a slight overhead for this, but does it have a large negative impact on the majority of applications? Of course it doesn't. No one is suggesting that one of the top-of-the-line polygon pushing games coming out today (say, Half Life 2 or Doom 3) should be written in Managed DirectX., but that doesn't mean that there isn't a whole slew of games that could be. I'll get more to that in just a few moments.