May, 2008

I decided to write a few posts about the role played by XML in the XNA Framework Content Pipeline, because this isn't well documented and people seem to find it confusing. The first thing to get straight is the distinction between which things are fundamental...

If your game has a lot of content, your LoadContent call might take a while. If loading takes a long time, you might want to display a "please wait" message. If you value polish, you might even decide this message should be animated in some...

Once upon a time there lived a bored young aristocrat named Stanley. Growing tired of his indolent lifestyle, Stanley decided to go into the manufacturing business, so he purchased a haggis factory, which was going cheap as its previous owner had died...

Not content to spend all day working on the Visual Studio side of XNA Game Studio, my colleague Stephen then chooses to spend his spare time writing more Visual Studio extensions - for fun! If only I had a more powerful blog post editor, I would choose...

John Doe has released a library that uses reflection to automatically serialize data to and from .xnb files, removing the need to manually implement a ContentTypeWriter / ContentTypeReader pair. Two things I want to say about this: It is really cool!...

Here's a nifty little VS feature that I keep forgetting about, then rediscovering and being amazed by how useful it is... If you have a lot of projects in the same solution, but are only working on one at a time and getting irritated by how long it takes...