XNA Content Assistant

The logistics of how content gets built in the VB template will change when GS 3.0 is released. Rather than hard-code all of the content building specifics into the VBContentManager class, this functionality has been moved into a stand-alone application, which will act as a bridge between a non-Game Studio project and the Content Pipeline. This application is called the XNA Content Assistant, and is a Windows form application with a graphical interface. However, it also supports being called from the command line in an invisible mode.

I'm currently putting the XNA Content Assistant through beta, naturally I want to debug such an important component thoroughly. It is functional at this time, and so here's a preview of what it looks like, and what it does:



You start out by opening your game's Visual Studio or Visual Express project file. (when running from a command line, you would supply this as an argument)



Based upon the location and contents of the specified project file, the XNA Content Assistant will automatically determine where your content folder is (even if you did not name it "content"). It will then automatically determine which XNA framework version your game is programmed against. The XNA Content Assistant understands how to build content for Game Studio Express (1.0 Refresh) projects, Game Studio 2.0, and Game Studio 3.0 projects created in either VB or C# in Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and the Express editions.

On the GUI, we can see the Assistant has successfully harvested content from my "Timeclock" application, and I am proceeding to select a platform (this would be the 2nd and final parameter you would need to supply via command line)



And lastly when we execute the build process, we can see that MSBuild's output is integrated nicely into the Assistant's UI, to help troubleshoot build issues such as missing fonts, etc. It also exports a log and a copy of the content project submited to MSBuild in your project's folder for reference.



As future XNA versions are released, XNA Content Assistant will be updated and your existing template can simply continue to utilize the updated Assistant, rather than requiring code changes to the template itself (i.e., the VBContentManager class, which will be largely obviated by the Assistant).