Okay, I was cornered by deprecation. I must handle large images in my application, and system.drawing is just not fast enough.
I remembered that DirecrDraw would solve this problem, but that's deprecated, and the docs told me I should do it in 3D instead. Not that it matters, since the Managed DirectX in Visual Studio is deprecated in favor of XNA anyway. Now, XNA doesn't work together with Visual Studio as I understand it, and the user would need to download extra framweorks anyway. The MSDN DirectX forums have closed, and now I need an Xbox just to ask a question about DirectX on the official forums :o
So, is there a way to use up to date hardware acceleration technologies in Visual Studio? What is supported and what is not? I'll need this software running for years to come, and I might even want to modify it in the future. It would be very unpleasant if the technology it's built on would turn obsolete anytime soon.