By now you've all probably heard about the announcement earlier this week about the XNA Framework beta that Microsoft will be releasing later this month. If you haven't signed up already to be notified, follow the directions in the XNA FAQ and do so (or set a reminder for 30 August).

It's hard for me to express just how excited about this upcoming release - it looks like it's got all the pieces needed to significantly change how lots of games are written (and how people learn to program games).

There are four aspects of XNA that I particularly like:

  • C# - I was leery of the language when I first started working with it, but now it's my language of choice for most projects.
  • Seamless support for the Xbox 360 controller - Being able to easily incorporate a real controller makes your Windows program feel like a real game (even if it, well, isn't quite there yet). I've tried some third party convertors (e.g., to get a GameCube controller working on a PowerBook) and they were far too flaky to be useful. If you don't already have a Xbox 360 Controller for Windows, you may want to pick one up before 30 August.
  • Credible, supported framework - It's an official Microsoft product, and it has already been demonstrated that it can be used to produce pro-quality games. A lot of game dev kits have been created in the past, but this one looks like it can gain widespread acceptance.
  • It's FREE! Yeah, it'll be $99 if you want to run it on 360 hardware, but that's not a requirement to write games. In fact, it's probably the one of the last things you'll need to do. Visual C# Express Edition is free and XNA Game Studio Express (which includes the XNA Framework) is (or, more correctly "will be") free as well. This puts a fully featured game dev kit into the hands of anyone who wants one.

Note that I don't break out "Can run code on an Xbox 360" as a top level item. While I think that's cool too, I lump that in with point number 3 - the fact that you can use it to build professional quality games that can run on real console hardware will make people take this framework more seriously than they might have otherwise. The recent flurry of press coverage has basically proven this point.

I'll probably get my code running on a 360 eventually, but I know that I'll be spending most of my dev time on Windows. I'm excited that it looks like my game-programming-life is about to get a whole lot easier. And the game-programming-world is about to get a whole lot more interesting...