XNA Express Beta Available for Free Download (build XBOX games in C#)

September 3rd Update: I just stumbled upon an awesome XNA tutorial site that includes a lot of great tutorials on how to get started with the XNA game framework.  This tutorial, for example, walksthrough all of the code needed to build the classic Pong game with it.  And this tutorial talks about how to customize the "Spacewar" starter kit.

August 31st, 2006: The XNA team released their first XNA Game Studio Express Beta release earlier today.  You can learn more about it and download it for free here (below is a screenshot from a fun app built with it).

This release works on top of the free Visual C# Express Edition, and provides the ability to build games using C# and .NET that target both Windows and the XBOX 360 (we did the work to port a .NET execution engine with PowerPC JIT support to the XBOX to enable this). 

The XNA Framework ships with the VS package and provides a managed code library for creating rich graphics, and incorporating 3D content into games.  I'm looking forward to having some fun with this. :-)

You can download it for free here.

Enjoy,

Scott

13 Comments

  • A .NET execution engine with PowerPC JIT? Surely you must be talking about Mono...

  • I got out of the video games biz many years ago - when 70 hour weeks at no overtime were the expected norm. And everything was written in C++, and you'd spend more time finding bugs and memory leaks than coding the actual game.

    Writing games in .NET would be a dream compared. These tools are going to be a revolution for home-brew coders. Microsoft just need to add the networking support in and come up with a way for normal punters to buy and download the stuff that gets developed. You'll anger the big publishers at first, but it'll just make the business stronger in the end to have some competition from "indies".

    Quick question:

    - Just to confirm - you can write all the games in VB.NET instead of C#, right?

    - Can you use the big boys Visual Studio 2005 instead of Express?

  • Scott, Is this for xbox 360 and xbox (original)? Also, can you elaborate on the ".NET execution engine with PowerPC JIT support"? Thanks!

  • Hi James/Mark -- we built a .NET Framework environment for the XBox that runs on PowerPC chips (which is what the XBOX 360 supports).

    IL with .NET is CPU neutral, so this didn't require any compiler changes. What we did need to-do was to build a JIT (just in time compiler) to execute as native PowerPC instructions at runtime. We also then added the debugging hooks to enable VS to connect remotely to debug.

    Pretty cool stuff. :-)

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Hi Mark,

    Unfortunately this only works on the XBOX 360 and on Windows proper. It isn't supported on the first generation XBOX.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Hi Boris,

    The Beta only works with C# and with the VS Express Edition. The plan is to enable full VS and other languages in the future.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Why only on VS express? What does VS express has that the full doesn't?

  • Hi Zach,

    VS will also be supported. I believe for this first beta they simply wanted to constrain their testing scenarios.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • If I download the Visual Studio Express program will this break my "real," full-version Visual Studio .NET 2005 that I have installed? I don't mind installing the express version to look at this, but I don't want to break my current Visual Studio install. Thanks.

  • Hi Johnny,

    The express versions of Visual Studio run side-by-side with the full version -- so you don't need to worry about it breaking anything.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Mr. Scott, I have seen some of the xna websites poping up now. They aren't all Microsoft owned, but they have xna in the url. What if I want to create an xna site? Are we allowed to use xna in the name of the domain? Thank you.

  • Hi JM,

    I believe you can use the XNA name in your url -- although to be honest I'm not an expert on trademark rules so am not really the best person to ask.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

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