I was about to write a different article, but then I thought about what would make a good example for my planned topic, and decided a framerate component would be a perfect testbed for it. So before I get started on my next real subject, I'm going to...

I noticed several threads about garbage collection on forums.xna.com this week. Is it just me or is everyone suddenly starting to worry about performance as they approach the end of the DreamBuildPlay competition? The crucial first step in any performance...

Reusable XNA components often contain content as well as code. For instance the bloom sample on the creators.xna.com site uses several custom effects, and the framerate component I described in my previous post needs a font to display the output. If you...

A common pattern in XNA games is to nest a "Content" folder inside the main game project, to keep things organized. We do this in all the samples available on the creators.xna.com site, for instance. When you come to load a piece of content, you have...

One of my favorite things about the C# project system in Visual Studio is the way it is implemented on top of MSBuild . Visual Studio provides a nice user interface for editing your project, but when you hit F5 it just calls through into MSBuild to do...

Nick Gravelyn has posted some code for embedding XNA content in zip archives . Not only does this provide compression for your asset data, but it also reduces clutter, replacing many .xnb files with a single .zip. He uses a custom MSBuild task (in a similar...