[.net] without a form?

I think that you need a handle to a form to do some drawing.

You could probably make the form's visible property false though.

You do need a form, or control of some kind.

I would say u dont need a form, when u doesnt want to display anything to the user, e.g a converter that starts without a UI and opens a file, convert it and write it to another file.

You need a Window Handle to initialize DirectX, so in Managed DirectX, you need a Form, because the form wraps the window handle.

Toolmaker