I have joined the XNA Community Gaming Platform team here at Microsoft

Recently, I started in a new role here at Microsoft - I have moved to the XNA Community Gaming Platform (CGP) team.  At a really high level, the XNA CGP team creates a set of tools and libraries to enable rapid development of games for the PC and the Xbox 360 using Visual C# Express 2005 (and with the upcoming 2.0 version, the standard and higher editions of Visual Studio 2005 as well).

I'm really excited to join the XNA team because of the focus on development tools, direct community engagement and grassroots efforts to help encourage more people to try out computer programming.

I've found some useful information online as I've started learning about the features that my new team provides:

• XNA Creators Club Online - https://creators.xna.com/
• XNA community forums - https://forums.xna.com/
• XNA team blog - https://blogs.msdn.com/xna
• XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 refresh download location - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=12ADCD12-7A7B-4413-A0AF-FF87242A78DE
• XNA Game Studio 2.0 announcement - https://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2007/08/13/announcing-xna-game-studio-2-0.aspx
• Gamefest 2007 information - https://www.xnagamefest.com/conference_details.htm

I also found a really interesting 2-part interview with Chris Satchell, the general manager of the organization that includes the XNA CGP team, that provides some interesting insights about possible future directions for the team:

• https://www.developmag.com/interviews/72/XNAbling-everyone-Part-1
• https://www.developmag.com/interviews/73/XNAbling-everyone-Part-2

As I settle into my new role, I'll be posting more about XNA community games features on my blog in addition to the other types of topics I've typically posted about in the past (from general setup creation and debugging issues to WiX to Visual Studio and the .NET Framework setup/deployment to Windows Media Center development and deployment).

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2007
  Nice one Aaron :-) I've been wanting to play with XNA since I first heard about it in Edge magazine back in 2003.  I still want too, of course, but even though I've got some more progamming skill since then there's still the matter of spare time! Any ideas about how XNA will be integrating with the Visual Studio Shell?  I also wonder if there will be any opportunity to expose more than 1 core of the Xbox 360/PC in future versions of the XNA framework and run using .NET 3.5, in particular supporting LINQ and the parallel tasks library that Somasegar was talking about on his blog recently?  Would be nice to be able to use Parallel.For() etc and see some further speedups to the code :-)

• Anonymous
  October 26, 2007
  My new team is using WiX v3.0 to create the MSI-based setups for the upcoming XNA Game Studio 2.0 product

• Anonymous
  October 26, 2007
  My new team is using WiX v3.0 to create the MSI-based setups for the upcoming XNA Game Studio 2.0 product