Problems with the box example in Frank Luna's introduction to his book '3D game programming with DirectX12'

Question

I am beginning to study Frank Luna's book '3D game programming with DirectX12'. To follow precisely his steps I have downloaded Visual Studio 2015 ( BUT I CAN INSTALL ANY VERSION YOU MAY SUGGEST ), even if now we are in 2020. When attempting to execute the instructions that he gives from page xxx to page xxxiii of the Introduction, I get two types of errors. The first is this list:

Cannot open include file: '../../Common/d3dApp.h': No such file or directory
1>  d3dUtil.cpp
1>c:\users\maurizio\desktop\intro\d3d12book\common\d3dutil.h(11): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'dxgi1_4.h': No such file or directory
1>  d3dApp.cpp
1>c:\users\maurizio\desktop\intro\d3d12book\common\d3dutil.h(11): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'dxgi1_4.h': No such file or directory
1>  DDSTextureLoader.cpp
1>c:\users\maurizio\desktop\intro\d3d12book\common\d3dx12.h(13): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'd3d12.h': No such file or directory
1>  Camera.cpp
1>c:\users\maurizio\desktop\intro\d3d12book\common\d3dutil.h(11): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'dxgi1_4.h': No such file or directory

The second problem is that in my Windows 10 computer and VisualStudio 2015 the target platform version he writes should be 10.x, is 8.1 instead.

And would it be possible to follow the book in Visual Studio 2019 ? Anyone does ?

I apologize for the disturb but I am really at the beginning ..... and I am stuck right there at the introduction :-(

Answer 1

Visual Studio 2015's default SDK is the Windows SDK 8.1, which does not have any DirectX 12 headers.

You need to install the optional "Windows Tools" component to get it.

See this blog post