SlimDX SDK (March 2009)

This is a major release in terms of new functionality and improvements behind the scenes. Many missing corners were filled in, and several usability enhancements were made across the library on top of the standard array of bug fixes. A new DLL containing beta-level technologies, such as Direct2D and Direct3D11, was added to showcase developing APIs. These APIs will be moved into the core SlimDX DLL once they are given a full release by Microsoft. Until then, they should be viewed as previews, and should not be used for products that expect stable behavior.

Performance is another issue focused on in the March release. After extensive testing, several improvements were made to the error handling infrastructure, which showed significant performance increases across the entire library. On top of this, performance issues in the math library were discovered and subsequently eliminated. This involved modifying the types to use fields instead of properties, as value type getters are not inlined in .NET prior to version 3.5. These small changes could have a substantial impact on your application simply by recompiling with the new DLL.