At last: Visual Basic Support for XNA!

In May 2011 Microsoft has added Visual Basic support for XNA and Windows Phone through the release of the Mango Toolset. I'm very excited to discover the possibilities of this framework. During my discovery journey I'll try to write down some findings in the hope others might enjoy my experience.

What is Microsoft XNA?

XNA is a development framework to build especially games for the XBox 360, PC and Windows Phone 7. As with every framework it encapsulates many basic functionality into advanced functions. A developer is shielded in this way for doing tedious low-level programming work to achieve the same result.

Why is this release of Mango so cool?

The development of applications for Windows Phone 7 was already possible in Visual Basic by using Silverlight. Silverlight is suitable for applications that are not time-critical. For most games, timing is absolutely crititcal, so Silverlight isn't the solution for cool games. With the release of Mango, disclosing XNA for Visual Basic, people like me are able to build time-critical applications too, like games.

My personal interests

As a matter of fact, as myself concerned, I'm more interested to have a framework to visualize industrial processes real time in a cool way as well as providing the user a intuitive, graphical 3D-interface. In the past I have build some interfaces for processes. I was frustrated that I had to keep myself to iconic display of the process, instead of showing some machine, with moving parts, just if you were watching the real machine.

Instead of showing just the text "valve is opening... valve is now opened", it would be great to show some part of the machine, containing the valve to open, zoom in on the valve, make a cross section, show how the valve is opening, zoom out again, close the cross section, and at least show a green led on top of the valve, telling the user the valve is opened.

The journey starts

To make use of the XNA framework you have to download it. Visual Studio SP1 is required for this framework.

My first remark is by the way, that it's kind of funny to download tools for Windows Phone if I'm not willing to develop for Windows Phone at all. But anyway, what's in the name? It's just one box, containing development tools for Windows Phone as XNA. For Windows XP users there is a separate download possible, by the way.

For my first steps in XNA Game Programming in Visual Basic, read the following page.