Read original post at Rodrigo Diaz's Blog
If you are an experienced DirectX programmer chances are you used the DirectDraw API for 2D drawing. If not, here’s a quick summary: it was used for quickly copying parts of one image to another using binary operations ("bit blitting"). This was a quick and good enough method for paletted or low BPP images, but if you wanted to do more advanced operations like rotation or alpha blending you had to implement your own software solution. With the advent of 3D graphics cards, hardware 2D support was phased out in favor of 3D acceleration, and this set the demise of DirectDraw.