I’d be pretty confident that most people know this already but I thought I’d throw it up here for lack of anything better to blog about, and for posterity of course. As all you XNA’ers out there know, you need Visual C# Express installed to use Game Studio Express, and Visual Studio 2005 professional doesn’t recognize the XNA project type. This sucks a lot of b*lls because it means you can’t use all of your funky productivity tools that you’ve come to depend on, you Resharper junkie you, because you’re stuck in C# Express.

As it turns out though, the only thing you really need Game Studio Express for is deploying to your Xbox, and for the content pipeline stuff, which incidentally is pretty cool. Create your projects as normal in professional, and add references to the Microsoft.Xna.Framework and Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game assemblies, and you’re good to go. For the content you can create a seperate normal XNA project in express that will solely be used for compiling your content. To make your life easy, modify the output directory in your project properties to point to your game projects bin directory.

When it comes time to deploy your game to the 360 you can change the games project file so that it looks like an XNA project again. Open the csproj file and add the line

<ProjectTypeGuids>{9F340DF3-2AED-4330-AC16-78AC2D9B4738};
{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>

below the ProjectGuid tag. Then open your sln file and change the line # Visual Studio 2005 to # Visual C# Express 2005. The solution should now open in Game Studio Express and you can deploy away.

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I’ve read numerous articles, reports, and blogs on the promise of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) lately. Things got a little easier once I understood that WPF is a programming model for developers building rich Windows applications that incorporate UI, media, and documents. It took me some time to figure out why we should care about this new XML-based graphics engine and API, however. I mean, it’s nice that everyone can build applications that look as good as Grand Theft Auto IV but will enterprise developers really use these capabilities?

The hype is pretty substantial out there - I’ve seen bold claims that WPF is the precursor to Microsoft’s ‘PDF-killer’ called WPF/E, a cross-platform and cross-browser standard that will lure developers away from Adobe. Similarly, WPF/E’s 3-D capabilities will target developers using Flash as a standard today and gradually begin to win them over. Perhaps the biggest promise I’ve seen for WPF is in the area of better working relations between developers and designers - I can only imagine how tough it is to take a superb website design in Photoshop and try to render it faithfully (both in UI and behavior) as a working application. It may be a little early to tell software developers and graphic designers that the war is over, but I’d say that the goal itself is a noble one…

Before we get too carried away with the potential of WPF to bring developers and designers to a joyful place where old grievances are forgotten, we should be careful to learn the basic capabilities of WPF as part of the .NET Framework 3.0 today. With both feet planted firmly on the ground, InnerWorkings has released a new Drill specifically for developers who wish to learn basic controls and layout in WPF. Shouldn’t you know the basic elements of WPF before launching into high-end 3-D images, complex animations, and composite graphics?

This is why I’d encourage you to check out our latest Drill on WPF - it’s called Basic Controls and Layout (3+ hours) and consists of 6 tasks for developers who want to learn the fundamentals of WPF:

• Introduction to WPF controls  
• Using brushes in WPF
• Creating a user interface in XAML
• Using StackPanel and WrapPanel
• Creating a layout using the DockPanel
• Creating a layout using the Grid panel

Each task is based on InnerWorkings’ hands-on, challenge-driven learning methodology and fully integrated within Visual Studio - you’ll find this new WPF Drill on Basic Controls and Layout for sale in our online catalog priced at $24.95 for individual developers.

When we say “hands-on”, that means you’ll be asked to code real WPF controls in sample Visual Studio projects; so you must have the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 and the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .Net Framework 3.0 installed on your computer to complete our coding challenges. In the meantime, all horror stories and disastrous experiences that involve developers working with designers are welcome and appreciated in this blog!

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