I recently updated to Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate. I was programming previously with DirectX 11 June 2010 SDK and want to continue to do so using Visual Studio 2012. However, I discovered that VS2012 comes with its own DirectX SDK (in Windows Kit 8.0) and I've been trying to migrate my code using the newer versions of d3d11. Everything went fine until I try to use effect files in my project (.fx files). I had to compile the Effects11 Sample in the DirectX SDK using VS2012 and link the lib file in my project. That went fine too. However, when I compile my project the function D3DX11CreateEffectFromMemory returns a E_NOINTERFACE error (no such interface is supported). Can anyone tell me why is that? Note that I'm using the d3d11.lib from the Windows Kit and the d3dx11.lib from the DirectX SDK. Perhaps I shouldn't mix them? However, everything else works fine when I mix them, except for the effect file creation. Any help would be appreciated. P.S. I don't know if this is helpful but just so you know, if I add an additional library directory in the project settings of "DirectXSDKInstallPath\lib\x86\" it works. Why is that? Does it mean I'm using the older version of the libraries? This will give a ton of warnings about redefined headers in winerror.h