Using directX to overlay another application

[LinuxProgrammer]

I am interested in writing an application that will display text on the screen while another application (that uses DirectX) is running. Effectively the information will appear as part of the application that owns DirectX's resources at the time.

I'm not a DirectX programmer, and am hoping to not have to become one to learn how to do this. Is this sort of thing common enough that I can be pointed to a relatively simple example?

Thanks in advance...

 

[LinuxProgrammer]

I should point out that I'm programming in C++ under MSVC.