   clearing resource slots in directx 11
  What is the correct procedure for unbinding a shader resource, vertex buffer, constant buffer, or Sampler State? Anytime I hand in a pointer to NULL (not a NULL pointer to a pointer) D3D11 crashes and spits out a message in the output about a corrupt or null value being assigned to a slot. Or is this strictly a debug version issue?   
  Why do you want to clear the slots?   ;  So resources that the shader is not using are not bound to the pipeline. For example I run technique A it uses 8 textures then run technique B it uses 6 textures. In this case 2 textures are still bound to the pipeline when B is run. now maybe it doesn't matter but this can lead to scenarios where a resource is bound both for input and output and I am not sure which will take precedence in that case so I prefer it doesn't happen. However it appears that it doesn't matter since the d3d11 api throws errors when I try to clear it anyway.   ;  The most recent command to bind something to the pipeline will invalidate the other binds in any scenario where a resource would otherwise be bound for both reading and writing.Unnecessarily changing bindings will reduce possible performance since you're asking the driver to maintain fewer things in cache that could have been a couple passes later.  So, you can either keep track of it  yourself, or let D3D do it for you.   