You don’t need to worry about the project setup so just click next and finish in the Win32 Project wizard dialog. Select “Visual C++ Win32 Project” template. Open the VisualStudio 2013 and create a new project. Once this is done, it’s time to try the DirectX SDK on VisualStudio 2013. Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (圆4)

Note that DirectX won’t reinstall the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable on your machine so you may need to install them manually if it’s necessary. Try uninstall them from your machine if you ever encounter the same issue. The reason for this failure is because my machine already has installed the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86/圆4 redistributable. There was a bit of hiccup during the installation that it fails with error code S1023. Having symbol files is very handy to perform debugging so decided to have them just in case. Only thing I had to spend seconds was to decide whether I should install the symbol files for DirectX. The installation is fairly simple and straightforward. You need to install the DirectX SDK you just downloaded from the previous step. The SDK can be downloaded from Microsoft for free. I saw DirectX is included in Windows Phone SDK but it seems I still need to install this SDK in order to produce desktop application using DirectX.

You need to download DirectX SDK in order to programming DirectX applications. This article shows how to set up DirectX 11 in VisualStudio 2013.

Directx setup