I am using GDI and GDI+ for 2D graphic for ages. GDI+ for a moment looked like mana from heaven, but it has some serious drawbacks. The most painfully one is speed, or lack of it to be more precise. Everything in GDI+ is done without any hardware acceleration. I've been searching for faster alternatives, for windows platform, with no luck. It took me by surprise, few days ago when I stumbled upon D2D Tom's blog.
The Good news is that boys and girls at Redmond are having some constructive ideas and lots of time on their side. The Bad news is that they are wasting that time making crapware.
To cut to the chase DIRECT2D is hardware accelerated 2D API (with software fallback) that will be shipped with Windows 7 and also available for Windows Vista via upgrade. It is built on top of Direct3D and requires DirectX 10. If you want to try it out download March(2009) DirectX SDK which includes build of Direct2D that runs both on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
So everything seems great so far, right?
I was actually impressed, until I looked at the code samples. What a bloated mess.
They did it again, instead of make things simple, they have managed to somehow make it even more complicated. Code that is intended to be used by general application developer, not a game developer, is just to complicated. Even a Direct3D API is simpler to use than D2D, you can find proof of concept on this page with c++ source code.
So where's this leave me now? I don't know. I, for one, would rather make use of D3D, but that's just me.