Isometric how?

Right, I am only a newbie to this DirectX lark but I have been programming Windows for a while. I''ve read the Direct Draw tutorials on this site and they have helped me quite a lot with the basics, like making surfaces and blitting bitmaps etc. However, although I have a decent idea of the general structure of the code, there isn''t anything (that I can find) on this site about blitting tiles to the screen and blitting sprites (with transparent areas). I realise that all the tiles in my (isometric) map should have a z-order and they should be blitted in order so that the items and the player that are placed on the ground are blitted after the ground tiles, to prevent overblitting. Now, I''m not sure whether DirectDraw works the same as Windows in that you have to collect all your window information and draw it all at once in the WM_PAINT message. So, what''s the question? I guess my question is (after all that), how do I blit isometric tiles that are an arbitrary size and how do I blit transparent sprites? I also heard something about ''compiled sprites'' and wondered how this is done as I believe it has some speed advantages. Finally, how do I do animation with a collection of sprites? Thanks in advance... KlDzny "You can be in a minority of one but the truth is still the truth." - Gandhi