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 lan- guages 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 too 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...