UCC Students Learn About XNA and Silverlight

On Monday I went to Cork to visit students at UCC.  Despite some technical difficulties involving scheduling and room changes, Microsoft Student Partners Nathan Forde and Sarah Fitzgerald managed to get together a great crowd!  We spent about a half hour talking about Silverlight and its framework and then another half hour playing Pong and discussing building an XNA game.

I had a couple of questions I promised I would post on my blog, so here they are:

1) What does the networking support look like for XNA Game Studio Express 2?

With GSE 2, there are new networking APIs.  These allow you to be able to create rich multiplayer games over XBox Live.  The networking support is based on XBox Live and will not provide general network access which would be required for things like SOAP/HTTP.

2) Can you do any kind of direct integration into DirectX with XNA?

There is no managed wrapper to access DX10 features.  If you really want to do this, you could try something like SlimDX, which is a community-based OpenSource Managed wrapper for DX9 and DX10.

3) Is anyone building professional games with XNA?

Yes!  The world's first commercial XNA game was released earlier this year; it's called Blobbit Push.  The XNA Creators Club website is a good resource for information about upcoming commercial XNA games.  Another great resource is the Microsoft XNA Developer Presentations.  If you scroll down to the Gamefest 2007 slides/presentations, you'll see a video of a talk with Torpex Games talking about their game and their experience with XNA Game Studio Express.

I was disappointed I didn't get to stay longer, as they also put together a Halo 3 Tournament on Wednesday night!  With 40 competitors, I don't think I would have stood much chance, but it sounds like it was a good time!

For those of you who don't read the XNA Team Blog, you'll be happy to know that yesterday they announced that the beta of GSE 2 will be available for download soon!

See you all at the XNA Tour on Monday, November 26th in Trinity College!

Technorati Tags: XNA , XNA Game Studio Express , Silverlight

Cross posted from Martha's Blog