Getting ready for game development with Visual C Sharp

This entry will mainly function as a resource for future tutorials in regards to game development and C Sharp programming. Mainly just linking to the installation files which are required since over time the installation procedures themselves have been made pretty straight forward. First of all you will have to download and install Visual C Sharp [...]

This entry will mainly function as a resource for future tutorials in regards to game development and C Sharp programming. Mainly just linking to the installation files which are required since over time the installation procedures themselves have been made pretty straight forward.

First of all you will have to download and install Visual C Sharp Express edition, completely free and offered by Microsoft. You can find this here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcsharp/

The next step is install the DirectX SDK which is required for programming with DirectX and XNA. You can find the latest DirectX SDK here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/sdk/

After installing the DirectX SDK you can already start programming with DirectX through managed DirectX, although that is a bit more complex than XNA, and assides from that further development of managed DirectX has stopped so for future projects you’ll be wanting to use XNA anyways.

You can find the latest version of XNA here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/
As you can see it currently still is in beta, being released somewhat along with Vista if I’m not mistaking. But it already works pretty smoothly and development on it is going nicely, if you’re interested in development of XNA you can keep track of the XNA blog.