In a post some time ago I mentioned going to the MSDN Roadshow in London and while there I was interviewed about the XNA demonstration we had over there.

I just found out that the video of this interview has been published on http://www.ilivetocode.com/games.

(On the same occasion also Paul Foster has been interviewed about his Libby and of course he did a much better job than I did).

For those who don’t know it, XNA is a game development solution built on top of the .NET Framework 2.0 for Xbox 360 and for Windows. It is basically a free plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 (or Visual C'# Express 2005 which is completely free of charge too) which allows to develop games for either the Xbox 360 or Windows.

The advantage of using XNA versus using the native DirectX is that it frees developers from having to write all the “plumbing” required to initialise the DirectX environment, loading resources in its pipeline and so on. For those not familiar with XNA, this means saving days (if not weeks) of work when developing a game.

The game I talk about in the video, is the XNA Racing Game, which has been developed by Benjamin Nitschke and is available for download (including also all the source code) and if you know C# you can easily modify it. If you don’t know C#… it is a very fun way to start getting familiar with it.