Yesterday I attended a seminar given by Microsoft Student Representitives. I forget their official title, but basicly they go around to Universities and show off Microsoft technology - evangelists maybe?

The topic was on XNA game development.

Usual presentation technology hickups aside (like trying to access the internet through the universities firewall via a wireless laptop connection without testing it beforehand…) I got to get a pretty good look at XNA. Nothing that I didn’t already know, but I got to see the racing demo that comes with the development suite. And boy, did that look cool.

I don’t have an xBox360 or even a DX9.0c capable videocard (Working on it.) So I haven’t to played with XNA, but as soon as I get a sufficent upgrade (and some free time) I’m going to have to muck around with it. You get the full source code to the racing game, so that alone will probably keep me entertained even though I’m not planning on doing any kind of professional next-gen 3D development.

As I’ve mentioned before I really like the C# language, and XNA directly intergrates with the express version of Visual C# (Which is free to all) So in a very untraditional Microsoft fashion, Microsoft has given away a very powerful tool. There are very good economic reasons why these tools are free, Microsoft has always known how to appeal to programmers and developers and it just means that in the next couple of years there will be alot of developers more familiar with xBox360 hardware, and more developers means more games for Microsoft to publish.

The only real downside to XNA is that it only works on Microsoft platforms. Which sadly cuts XNA from my requirements for 3rd party libraries.

If you’re interested in XNA and what it has to offer head over to www.xna.com