Questions regarding D

[William Newbery]

I use c++ extensivly, however I find several shortcoming of c++ highly annoying, and it looks as if D addresses most of these problems for me, however I'm not certain on certain points as Ive either been unable to find any good info, or the info I found was very out of date.

1)IDE support: Is there a Visual Studio 2008 plugin avaible for programming D? If not are there any windows IDE's for D that are at least comparable to VS (ie built in debugger, good autocompletion, can go straight to where something was defined/declared, etc)?

2)Garbage Collection: Can the garbage collector just be removed from projects or be completly replaced by a diffrent form of garbage collection, eg refrence counting?

3)Compatibility between D compilers: Does the D standard enforce binary compatibility between compilers. Eg if I compiled a libary with the DMD compiler and gave the static lib to someone that uses some other D compiler, will they be able to use my lib without any problems?

4)Support for directX: Specificaly I need to  be able to use d3d9, d3dx9, d3d10, d3dx10 and xAudio2.

5)Support for classes in dynamic libaries, and the ability to dynamicaly load these libaries.