Wow, I wrote a lot of articles this month ! I thought 16 posts in a single month might be a personal best, but turns out I beat this back in March 2007 , when I managed 18 posts. I guess this one bumps me up to 17. Still one short though :-)

Here’s a subtle improvement I bet you would never notice if I didn’t point it out, but which should save much pulling-out-of-hair for those who previously ran into this issue… XNA supports two different color formats: byte values ranging 0-255, or floating...

Today we released the source code for the demo I showed in my MIX talk , so you can try this for yourself using the Windows Phone emulator . This is basically a mash-up of existing samples (I borrowed pieces of Skinned Model , Custom Model Effect , Generated...

As of version 4.0, XNA Game Studio no longer supports the ResolveBackBuffer API and associated ResolveTexture2D class. This API did basically the same thing as RenderTarget2D (draw using the GPU, with the result ending up in a texture), just in a slightly...

We made several changes to the rendertarget API in Game Studio 4.0, all with the goal of increasing usability and reducing error. The most common cause of confusion is probably the RenderTargetUsage.DiscardContents behavior, but this is one thing we did...

As of version 4.0, XNA Game Studio no longer supports point sprites.   Why? One big reason, plus two small ones. The big reason is that DirectX 10 and 11 do not support point sprites, so if we kept them in our API, we would be unable to someday move...

Videos of the Windows Phone 7 Series presentations from MIX10 are now available online. For an introduction to the platform, start with Joe Belfiore , Charlie Kindel , and Istvan Cseri . If you want to make games (or apps) using XNA, start with Michael...

I was relieved when the comments on my earlier post about backward compatibility agreed with the approach we chose for XNA Game Studio 4.0. Banjobeni summed up the general sentiment: "If you break it, break it good." The initial motivation for...

This makes me feel old, and at the same time like a small boy who wants to run in circles shouting “yippee!” Back in 1993 I had just finished high school, and got a summer job where, for the first time ever, I was paid to write computer programs. The...

At the MIX keynote this morning, we announced the Windows Phone Developer Tool Community Technology Preview, which includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0, and the Windows Phone Emulator, and is available as a free download...

I must confess, I oversimplified when I labeled the yellow circle in this post as “Windows laptop”. Sure, the Reach profile in XNA Game Studio 4.0 does correspond to what features are widely available across different Windows machines (which makes it...

I set out to write an article about the unique features of XNA Game Studio on Windows Phone 7 Series, but while trying to populate my outline, I realized, wow, there actually aren’t many things different about Game Studio 4.0 on the phone compared to...

Today we announced what I've been hinting at this past few weeks: XNA Game Studio 4.0 is coming soon * to a phone near you! Quick summary: New platform Windows Phone 7 Series New features Integrates with Visual Studio 2010 Dynamic audio output Microphone...

If you've been paying attention to my recent posts, you probably noticed I have been thinking about ways we could improve the XNA Framework API. Which begs the question: how much is it possible to clean up an API while maintaining backward compatibility...

It's all very well to say we could simplify caps management by looking at what is actually supported by real hardware, then bucketing everything into just a few of the more common combinations. But there is an obvious flaw in this logic: we can only examine...

Optional features with hundreds of caps bits do not a great developer experience make. How do I know which caps I need to check on which hardware? What do I do if they are not set? Some of the caps we have today are just silly. How is a 3D game supposed...

There are many reasons for differences between platforms , and several ways an API designer can try to rationalize such things. Some features fundamentally don't exist, and are not practical to emulate. Earlier Radeon graphics cards do not support TextureAddressMode...