title: Where to start with Direct2d?
body: <p>Interested in learning Direct2d to create a Windows 8 app, but after 2 hours of research I'm thoroughly confused. Samples like this (<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd370994%28v=vs.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">Creating a Simple Direct2D Application</a>) seem to assume you know what an <code>HWND</code> and <code>HRESULT</code> is, and how the Windows API works in general.</p>
  
  <p><strong>My question is this:</strong> do you need an understanding of the Win API, COM, OLE, and all this other Windows stuff in order to get a good grasp on Direct2d/3d? </p>
  
  <p>All the other barebones tutorials assume that you know all this stuff and I don't really know where to start. The startup D2D project in VS 2012 gives you a bunch of files but there's no <code>main</code> or <code>WinMain</code>... How does this program even start?</p>