Creating the Primary Surface (Windows CE 3.0 Graphics and Multimedia)

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The primary surface is the surface currently visible on the monitor and is identified by the DDSCAPS_PRIMARYSURFACE flag. You can only have one primary surface for each DirectDraw object.

When you create a primary surface, remember that the dimensions and pixel format implicitly match the current display mode. Therefore, this is the one time you don't need to declare a surface's dimensions or pixel format. If you do specify them, the call will fail and return DDERR_INVALIDPARAMS - even if the information you used matches the current display mode.

The following example shows how to prepare the DDSURFACEDESC2structure members relevant for creating the primary surface.

DDSURFACEDESC2 ddsd; ddsd.dwSize = sizeof(ddsd);
// Tell DirectDraw which members are valid. ddsd.dwFlags =
DDSD_CAPS; // Request a primary surface. ddsd.ddsCaps.dwCaps =
DDSCAPS_PRIMARYSURFACE;

After creating the primary surface, you can retrieve information about its dimensions and pixel format by calling its IDirectDrawSurface5::GetSurfaceDescmethod.