Original Post
I'm trying to remove the effects pipeline from my program and have realized that I have no idea how to load a precompiled shader without the effects functions. I've found example code that uses D3DReadFileToBlob, but that is only available in the Windows 8 SDK (I'm using the June 2010 SDK). I've even tried linking to the d3dcompiler.lib in the Windows 8 SDK, but still can't use the function. Right now, I'm attempting to read in the file through std::ifstream into a std::vector, then use CreateVertexShader(). Is this the right way to go? Also, how do I set up the input layout afterwards? Most of the examples I see store the byte code in a ID3DBlob, so they are able to use ID3DBlob::GetBufferPointer() to retrieve the void *pShaderBytecodeWithInputSignature required in the CreateInputLayout() function. My byte code is stored in a vector, so how do I do this? Can I create a ID3DBlob from a vector?