A while I back I posted about a UIElementRendererHelper class I had made to simplify life when mixing Silverlight and XNA Framework rendering in Windows Phone 7 Mango. Since then we've shipped an update or two to the tools and along with those has come...

UPDATE: Please see this new post regarding UIElementRendererHelper as it includes a newer version of the code that is better suited for Windows Phone 7.1 SDK RTM. With the new Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta you can combine Silverlight and XNA...

A while back I wrote up a method for rendering XNA Game Studio 4.0 content inside of a WPF window. My method involved using a render target and doing a CPU transfer of those bits into a WriteableBitmap. This method had some pros and cons: Pros: ...

MediaPlayer, the interface for playing music on Windows Phone, is seeing some small tweaks that can affect applications. These changes are visible in the emulator that comes with the January update to the Windows Phone Developer Tools and will become...

This isn’t fully game related, but I see so many people posting code on forums that looks like this: Stream stream = storageContainer.CreateFile( "MyFile.txt" ); StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter (stream); writer.Write( "Stuff"...

One of the problems that some folks have hit in XNA Game Studio 4.0 is not being able to use the build-time content pipeline assemblies in their Windows games. Generally this is desired when developers are trying to save out an object using the IntermediateSerializer...

Developers moving across all three of the platforms supported by XNA Game Studio might find themselves working with their storage code to create a single codebase that works across all three. One of the main confusions can be the issue of what actually...

In previous releases of XNA Game Studio, there were the Texture2D.Save and Texture2D.FromFile methods for encoding and decoding images, but they only worked on Windows. In XNA GS 4.0, we introduced a few new methods: Texture2D.SaveAsPng, Texture2D.SaveAsJpeg...

One of the more abstract lessons I learned through making my AppWeek game was to build for the current project. I am, in my spare time, trying to build what one could call a 3D game engine. I’ve been (very) slowly building up code in various areas that...

Still continuing on about my AppWeek game , another bit that really helped me out was leveraging existing code for pieces of the game I didn’t really know how to make in a short time. While I do have a decent amount of generic code I’ve accumulated over...

Continuing my little series on how I created my AppWeek game , let’s talk about triangles, specifically those that make up a level. When working on a 3D game, you’ll more than likely reach a point where you need to optimize your rendering. You’re either...

When I started on my AppWeek game , I wanted to build the game using the Reach profile as much as possible so I could more easily reuse the graphics part on Windows Phone. I was pretty close; the only piece of my game that didn’t directly convert to Windows...

As Shawn blogged yesterday , we wrapped up AppWeek last week and got to see a lot of cool games from the team. I put in a bit of overtime on my game and ended up with a split-screen first person shooter on PC and Xbox 360 and a single-player tech demo...

Allow me to be a bit nostalgic here for a post. It’s December 2006 and I’m a college kid in Grand Rapids, Michigan. XNA Game Studio Express was just released and promised the opportunity to make games more easily with C# and an API built for rapid creation...

First some prefaces: This isn’t any official solution to embedding XNA Framework graphics inside a WPF application. This is simply my personal attempt at making it happen. The code here might not be the most optimized, but it certainly gets the job done...

With the recently released beta of XNA Game Studio 4.0, one of the new changes you may have seen is the updates to the Storage namespace of the framework for Windows and Xbox 360. While it’s all still StorageDevice and StorageContainer, you will see that...

Remember that thing I said about simulating landscape mode in the emulator? Forget about it. With the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta, I’m pretty excited to say that landscape is now natively supported by the emulator so all you have...

Update: My gesture sample is also now available for download which shows an example of mixing awesome gestures with awesome cats. You can find that here: http://creators.xna.com/en-us/sample/gestures In the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta released...

The current CTP for the Windows Phone Developer Tools does not include the final scaling/rotation logic that will automatically handle orientation for XNA Game Studio games. Because of this it can be hard to start working on a landscape game for Windows...

Update: D’oh. I just now realized that Michael beat me to this topic five days ago. You can see his version on his blog: http://klucher.com/blog/expert-settings-for-multiplatform-development . One thing most XNA Game Studio developers are likely missing...