I need clarification of a void* pointer. What could be it be used for? Any reference material would be great.

Okay, so this is a give and take situation. Performance vs Structure. I can understand that.

When you say problems you're referring to things like memory management? ie. if you create so many devices, buffers, render targets, etc, that inevitably have to be released at some point.

Yup, I followed those tutorials and some more I found online and in books. I have looked into XNA, which would require me to learn C#. I've actually heard good things about it, but I'd rather much stick with DirectX more or less for a learning experience.

Actually, in the DirectX tutorial for initializing Direct3D, they create a global of the Direct3D object with IDirect3D9::Cre ateDevice. I wanted to know if having the object as a global...

I been trying to learn DirectX and Direct2D with C++. I'm proficient in C++, but I'm not sure how to do several things in working with these APIs.

First, I'm not sure how to program in a structured manner or style in context with DX and D2D. Is there reference material anyone would suggest?

For instance, in Direct2D in order to create a 'render target' you must initialize a 'factory'. This factory should retain its life...