What is XNA?

Although Microsoft has been providing a quality game development SDK through the DirectX family of libraries, the advent of the C# and .NET managed environment is providing you with the opportunity of accessing DirectX components through the .NET runtime. When it was first introduced in the DirectX9.0 SDK, it was known as “Managed DirectX” (or MDX) and quickly became a favorite set of libraries for .NET games.

During the beta phase of MDX 2.0, however, the DirectX team at Microsoft wanted to take the managed libraries into a different direction. Rather than providing a managed “port” of the C++ binaries, the team took things to the next level by creating a managed layer on top of DirectX itself (and deprecating the MDX library stream altogether).

First branded as “XNA”, this initiative became more of a way to provide a game content pipeline system that rests on top of DirectX. While still using .NET code, XNA took care of most of the “lower level” DirectX management, and allows the game development team to focus more on the content creation aspects of the game.

Cross Platform Game Development

With the release of the XBox360 from Microsoft, it was announced that not only could a developer deploy an XNA project to a Windows PC, but the same project could also be launched on the XBox360! As of this writing, you can commercially sell a project created with XNA on the Windows platform, but cannot (as yet) sell it on the XBox360. The only way of getting your game project on the XBox is via the XNA Creators Club; the club is free to join, but you are required to pay an annual subscription if you want to share your game with others.

While these tutorials will focus a lot more on the Windows platform, there are some instructions available on the MSDN for connecting your XBox360 console with XNA Game Studio 2.0.

Step 1:

The first step in starting with XNA game development, is to decide which development environment you want to use. If you already own Visual Studio 2005, then it is now possible to pull down the XNA Game Studio as an add-on to the environment. However,
if you don’t currently own (or use) Visual Studio 2005, then you will first need to download and install a free express edition.

Step 2:

The next step is to make sure you have applied the recent service patch for the Visual Studio environment. If you are using Visual Studio 2005, then you can download SP1 here. If you are using any of the Visual Studio express editions, then make sure you patch the version you are running over here.

Step 3:

Finally you are ready to begin game development with XNA! Download the XNA Game Studio 2.0 and install it.