I keep running into devs with similar opinions (minus the C). Coding things from scratch or almost from scratch is far, far easier and more reliable than hoping to God crucial parts of my program aren't deprecated before i'm even done making it (especially if i don't develop full-time). Due to all this hell, i've largely abandoned C++ development and moved to C. Especialyl with systems like windows that don't have dependency management. The reason these runtimes are distributed is because, well, if you don't, you could actually run into a system that doesn't have them. DirectX 9.0 will overwrite the earlier versions.Kohlrak: That, and dynamic linking is one of those ideas that's really, really good in theory, but the deprecation hell we're seeing since the common adoption of java has made it almost like developing for DOS. If you had an earlier version of DirectX installed on your computer, you will see little difference in used space on your hard drive. The remaining DirectX files use approximately 18 MB of hard drive space. Once installed, you can delete the installation files. Hard Disk Approximately 65 megabytes (MB) of available space for installation. Microsoft Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), or Windows 2000, Windows XP. For information on creating a restore point, please refer to the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles: We recommend Windows Me and Windows XP users create a 'System Restore' point before installing. The DirectX 9.0a runtime cannot be uninstalled.

Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP For full details please review the 'DirectX SDK EULA.txt' and 'DirectX Redist.txt' located in the license directory. The redistributable license agreement covers the terms under which developers may use the Redistributable. For full details please review the DirectX SDK EULA.txt and DirectX Redist.txt files located in the license directory. This download provides the DirectX 9.0c end-user multi-languaged redistributable that developers can include with their product.

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