Fixed functionality post deleted?

I posted a question the other day about the loss of the fixed function rendering in Direct3D 10 and suggested that Microsoft provide some native support for "stock shaders" that would implement fixed function rendering without requiring EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION to write their own shaders for legacy style rendering. It looks like that post has been deleted. If that post is not related to Direct3D 10 development, then I'm not sure what is.

The loss of fixed functionality rendering will only make the portation of existing OpenGL applications to D3D that much more difficult. It's bad enough that Direct3D 9 does not allow the application to take advantage of the underlying hardware (HW assisted wide lines, HW assisted two-sided lighting, Stereo, Overlay, etc.), now those applications have even less incentive to make the switch because of the SIGNIFICANT effort it takes to code up a fixed function pipeline. The world of 3D graphics application is not composed entirely of games and professional applications are trying to make an effort to move to D3D. I always thought that a graphics API was supposed to make the developer's life easy -- I guess I was wrong and apologive for wasting everyone's time.

[1272 byte] By [tranders] at [2008-2-4]