In general, I believe most developers are better served by moving to Direct3D 11 or Direct3D 12 rather than continue to use a 25+ year old version of Direct3D. That said, there still seems to be a desire for Direct3D 9 in projects even now.

One solution is of course to continue to use the legacy D3DX9 package via NuGet, but this is same code we shipped in June 2010 and has not been updated since. There's a lot of bugs, and this DLL remains closed source.

As such, it might be worthwhile to create a 'core port' of DirectX Tool Kit for DX 9. This would include:

• DDSTextureLoader, ScreenGrab, and WICTextureLoader which have already been ported to DX9 for DirectXTex.
• Audio, Input, and SimpleMath as they are since XAudio2Redist fully supports Windows 7 SP1 or earlier.
• A Minimal-viable product (MVP) would be BasicEffect, PrimitiveBatch, SpriteBatch, SpriteFont, and VertexTypes along with the loaders above.
• GeometricPrimitive could be added if there was demand.
• Model is probably out of scope, but could also be ported if there was demand.