XNA Game Studio Express has good support for debugging C# code, but is not so helpful when it comes to diagnosing problems with your graphics rendering calls. Fortunately, the native DirectX SDK includes some tools that can be invaluable when your gorgeous...

I often see people trying to use the XNA Game class in unusual places, for instance to host an XNA game inside a WinForms application. That is usually a bad idea. The Game class is designed to be simple, automatically setting everything up ready for you...

Way back in November I blogged about how to use MSBuild to run your own content build, bypassing the C# Express user interface. I only recently noticed the XCB project on Codeplex , which does exactly that and provides a nice looking user interface for...

Another XNA team member arrives in the land of blogs! Dean Johnson starts off by talking about the math involved in rotating 3D objects . Good introduction to dot products, cross products, and orientation matrices.

Taking screenshots of Windows games is easy thanks to that handy little PrintScreen key, but Xbox has no built in screenshot functionality so we have to roll our own as part of our game code. XNA doesn't have any way of transferring files back from...

Those of you who have tried to render point sprites on Xbox will have noticed they don't work quite the same as on Windows. We are working on updating the XNA documentation to cover the various Xbox HLSL extensions, but in the meantime, here's what you...

Channel9 has a rather long video from the XNA Game Studio Express launch event last month. Not only do you get to meet the famous George Clingerman, but in the middle there is some footage of yours truly demonstrating a splitscreen shooter game I wrote...

I said I would write some more about using custom renderstates with SpriteBatch, and being a man of my word, here it comes... The SpriteBlendMode enum has built in support for a couple of the most common blending modes. AlphaBlend is good for most...

Reading Chris To's article about Xbox CLR performance (see my previous post) reminded me of a subtle optimization for constructing new vector instances. Given some code like: DoCoolStuffWithVector( new Vector3(23, 42, -1)); You can rewrite this to...