Before you can do this tutorial, you will need the following:

1.  Visual Studio 2010 or Visual C++ 2010 Express (or Visual Studio 2008)*.
2.  A knowledge of basic C++ and Win32.
3.  A knowledge of basic Direct3D 11 and 3D rendering using HLSL
4.  A burning desire to make games.

* - other versions of C++ compilers will also run DirectX, however, there are some language specific changes you may need to make in each of the demo applications.

We have already learned how to control the programmable shaders.  Now we will learn how to control and manipulate the fixed portions of the pipeline.  In this lesson, we are going to start with the rasterizer stage.  While it isn't programable, we can still set its properties.  We'll cover this here.

Texture sampling isn't technically speaking a stage on the pipeline, but it is still done by hardware.  As such, we need a way to control how it is done.  We'll talk about that in this lesson.

This lesson we are going to start disussing the output-merger stage.  specifically, the action of blending colors with those already placed on the back buffer.  This creates a number of effects, such as semi-transparency.