I have some DirectX applications I developed in college using DirectX August 2007 SDK. I would like to have August 2007 and the latest SDK installed so I can port my application to the newest framework.
Does anyone have experience with having multiple frameworks installed, or is it discouraged?
Thanks
My solution is to make sure you change all visual studio paths related to directx to use the environment variable that's being created by the dxsdk installer (it's called something like DXSDK_DIR). Then you change all include and library paths in visual studio to $(DXSDK_DIR)\whatever instead of C:\Program Files\DirectXSDKSpecificVersion\whatever. This means you can change directx version by change that environment variable and restart visual studio.
If you use another development environment the same trick should be applicable but you have to modify your make file or whatever build setup you use.
We moved away from using "Tool->Options->Projects and Solutions" to define the include directorys for both system wide and SDK wide librarys inside the project settings. The reason for this, was that this was not carried accross when we added a new developer onto the team. It would intail the new person copying accross all these extra include directory's and lib directorys.
Instead we settled on just using the Project Settings, include paths for both LIB and HPP files. We would rarely touch the Project and solutions VC++ Directories in TOOL->Options->Projects and Solutions.
Recommend to install the early version of your SDK first, then get it to compile then move accross to the latest framework instead. Even opt for a virtual machine so that you can fast forward and rewind depending on the DLL hell you get into. But the best of my knowledge DirectX uniquly names their DLLS with the version number to prevent DLL hell from occuring.
Have fun.
IMO, you don't need it. Its not that much hassle upgrading to the latest version. As long as you did things correctly there should be few problems. The only thing that has changed over the past couple of years is the shader compiler but the error messages are pretty handy for telling you whats up :)