by Uditha Sampath Bandara

 

Microsoft XNA platform enable developers to make their games far more easily. Latest XNA version 3.0 enables to develop video games for pc, Xbox360 and zune devices. It support for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. For the development environment you need to use one of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 products .As the main programming language you can use C# 3.5

For XNA Games you need to have following System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Service Pack 3

Hardware requirements are identical to those for Visual Studio 2008, plus a graphics card that supports DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 1.1 (Shader Model 2.0 is recommended). Zune development requires the Zune 3.0 firmware.

You can download trail Visual Studio 2008 products software from following link                               

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/aa700831.aspx

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 products

Visual Studio 2008 Standard
Visual Studio 2008 Professional
Visual Studio 2008 Tools for the Microsoft Office System
Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Software Architects
Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Software Developers
Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Software Testers
Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Database Professionals
Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite 

Also you can use Visual C# 2008 Express Edition (Free version of the visual studio family) for the development

You can download Visual C # 2008 Express Editions from following link. http://www.microsoft.com/Express/

 Then you need to download Microsoft XNA Game studio 3.0.You can download that from following link.  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7d70d6ed-1edd-4852-9883-9a33c0ad8fee&displaylang=en

After you download both software’s you ready to install them.

->First install Visual Studio 2008 or any other product from Visual Studio family.

->Then install Microsoft XNA Game studio 3.0

  ->XNA Game studio install as an add-on to Visual studio.
  ->Now you are ready to get started with XNA Game studio 3.0.

            

Start menu->All programs->Microsoft XNA Game studio 3.0 ->Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

  

  ->Now you can select New Project from the file menu

  

->Then go to XNA game studio 3.0 and select Windows Game (3.0) 

    

 

From next tutorial you can learn about the XNA programming environment and first Hello world program in XNA.

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