Jul 29, 2011 17:01 GMT  ·  By

While Microsoft has been hard at work building the next major iteration of Windows, some of the resources provided for Windows 7 and earlier Windows client have been ignored.

Case in point: the DirectX software development kit. The evolution of the DirectX SDK has been frozen for well over a year now.

Furthermore, the software giant has offered no information about why there have been no DirectX SDK updates, or when should developers expect new refreshes.

Those devs leveraging the DirectX SDK already know that there was a time when Microsoft updated the kit one every few months.

The last update to the DirectX SDK was provided on June 7th, 2010, well over a year ago. There were no new DX SDK downloads offered since then.

The Redmond company did provide new releases of the DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer and of the DirectX End-User Runtimes in April 2011, but that was about it.

And even so, in April 2011, customers received nothing more than a refreshed version of DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010) – the official label is a dead giveaway.

The DirectX Developer Center on MSDN also seems to be frozen in time, with the last post published to the DirectX Developer Blog over a year ago.

Still, I don’t take the lack of DirectX updates as a sign of inactivity from the software giant, as I’m more than sure that Microsoft is working on the future of the technology, even though it’s completely mute on the matter.

Windows 8 is bound to bring a new version of DirectX, in line with the evolution of the operating system’s underlying graphics technology.

The way I see it, the software giant will need to upgrade the developer resources tailoring them to the next iteration of DirectX, including the SDK.

DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer is available for download here.

DirectX End-User Runtimes is available for download here.

DirectX Software Development Kit (SDK) is available for download here.