Hi Ammar, I didn't see your post at the connect site, so I decided to open one: https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=430609&SiteID=226 Hoping that it would be taken into account for the next XNA iteration. Oh, and perhaps this link would be of help to anyone facing the same problem for the time ...

Does the whole building have to be in one mesh (including its windows)? If you split the windows to separate geometries that can be rendered on their own, you will be able to switch their texture much easier than if you want to do it without splitting them from the building mesh.

I don't remember ever that the D3D9 SDK had a sample with such a capability. They used to have an old Water sample that used a special bump mapping technique to render water waves, but it wasn't an interactive demo (beyond moving the camera). I think you can find such a demo on NVidia's developer website (their old samples in ...

I think this problem isn't particular to D3D itself, but rather to the display device. The display driver (or is it Windows?) won't allow you to activate the screen on a card that isn't connected to a monitor. Try fiddling around with the display's control panel, and see if you can force it to activate the second card as a clone ...

I wouldn't be surprised if it is a bug in ManagedDX (support for it has stopped quite a long time ago). I'd say try putting back the implicit swap chain surface back instead of that leaking surface. I hope this helps.

Try activating Dialog mode on your 3D device. It has a certain performance hit, but it should solve your problem. See IDirect3DDevice9::SetDialogBoxMode()

Yes it is possible. You can use C++/CLI to do that very seamlessly and easily. After all, as far as D3D is concerned, you only need an HWND. So once you create your control, just pass its Handle to your native D3D creation code and everything should work as normal from there on.

Also try activating D3D debug output and see what does it say... Instructions can be found here: http://www.inframez.com/papers/d3dforums.htm

Errors of this kind are almost always accompanied by an explanation message from D3D's debug output. To activate and see these messages, please read: http://www.inframez.com/papers/d3dforums.htm  I'm quoting the relevant section here: DirectX has an excellent feature called the Debug Runtime. This ...

I did something like this before, but I don't stop rendering when the window minimizes (actually, it was a component, and the user can call SuspendRendering() any time he wants, so it could be used on minimize). My point is that even if your window is minimized, D3D shouldn't crash on you if you keep rendering. You should investigate ...