VB.NET XNA Tutorial 0: Prologue

I hesitated a little bit about doing this VB.NET related XNA blog stuff for a couple of reasons. First, there's a new version of Game Studio Express on the way out shortly (version 2.0) which has support for Visual Studio 2005. That means very soon, you will no longer be required to use Visual C# Express for XNA related IDE features.

But unfortunately, support for Visual Studio 2005 doesn't equate to support for languages other than C#. Here's a good thread on the subject over at the xna forums, the meat of which is captured in this post by Shawn Hargreaves (one of Microsoft's XNA guys)

"... we are only doing IDE work to integrate the XNA Framework into the C# project system, and not currently supporting the project systems for any other languages. In the absence of this IDE work, you miss out on exactly two things:

• Content pipeline integration
• The ability to deploy and debug on Xbox 360

Now, you may be just fine without those things. Maybe you're making a Windows game that doesn't use the Content Pipeline. In that case you don't care about our IDE integration, so the lack of it will not hurt you, and you can use any .NET langauge you like.

If you want to use the Content Pipeline, or deploy to Xbox, you can still do that by building your other-language code into an assembly, then using a stub C# project that links with this assembly to build your content, deploy to Xbox, and then call into your real assembly as soon as it starts up. It's a hack, but some people have reported success working this way."

So that means for the immediate to long term, we're officially "XNA hackers". I dunno about you but that makes me feel like a rebel.

Anyway, the other reason I thought twice about this was the fact that, over at Alan Phipps's website (which is permalinked right over there in the links area), a lot of this has been explained already. After following the tutorials and gaining a little bit of insight into the process, I've decided I'm going to offer you my take on it. Rather than build a specific application for a specific task (which a lot of tutorials seem to do), here we'll be building something a little more generic; more of an engine that can be used to do "whatever" in 2D. Some of it will be "here's how you do it", and some of it will be me showing up to the party 5 months late with "omg I didn't even know about render targets! Holy crap, now we have to totally rewrite the engine!"

At any rate, you'll have a couple different sources to draw from when it comes to using XNA with VB.NET, and there's really not much of that floating around the net right now.