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As probably everyone here know, Microsoft killed XNA in its tracks for reasons many people didn't understand. They seemed to be focusing on C++ and DirectX for game development on all platforms, including Windows Phone.

Maybe this was part of their plan: Microsoft has started to push a new library, Win2D. It is based on Direct2D, and can be accessed from both C++ and C#. There is speculation that this could lead the way for a Win3D down the line. Win2D is supported on both Windows Store and Windows Phone applications (Managed DirectX is already accessible to C# for Windows desktop games).

Of course, DirectX is extremely low-level, so hopefully some engines or libraries will leverage it and possibly bridge the gap between Win2D and Managed DirectX to at least put C# back to where XNA started years ago.

Ah yes Microsoft's infamous
"Hey this is working great! Awesome lets stop supporting it and start completely over with something new!"

hallsofvallhalla wrote:Ah yes Microsoft's infamous
"Hey this is working great! Awesome lets stop supporting it and start completely over with something new!"

Truer words were never spoken.

I get so frustrated every time we upgrade something at the office. Simple things that worked well suddenly are gone, sometimes replaced by convoluted methods, sometimes not replaced at all.

It gets really old after a while. My business partner wants to start billing Microsoft for all the time we lose whenever we upgrade Microsoft Office

I use to love DirectX when I coded in Visual Basic 6. I think I am going to get into this Win2D. It seems pretty neat. That's if I can get a free version of Visual Studio. I thought I had one but Microsoft canceled it after 30 days or something. I need to get an email from my uni to get it activated.

Sim wrote:I use to love DirectX when I coded in Visual Basic 6. I think I am going to get into this Win2D. It seems pretty neat. That's if I can get a free version of Visual Studio. I thought I had one but Microsoft canceled it after 30 days or something. I need to get an email from my uni to get it activated.

Even if you can't get Professional or Ultimate version, the free Express edition would have everything you need. The paid versions are more about TFS integration, data and code modeling, database exploration (even though I think Express even has that now), and some other stuff. So much has funneled down into Express it is hard to even point out the stuff that is only in the paid versions. But Express definitely has everything you need for game development.

if i remember correctly they removed vc2013 download. they only got the newer ones.

I'm not sure what you mean. Here is a link to all of the Visual Studio Express 2013 version (you would want the one for Windows and probably the one for Windows Desktop as well).

Does Win2D require an older version of Express?

Sim wrote:I use to love DirectX when I coded in Visual Basic 6. I think I am going to get into this Win2D. It seems pretty neat. That's if I can get a free version of Visual Studio. I thought I had one but Microsoft canceled it after 30 days or something. I need to get an email from my uni to get it activated.

If you go to school you should be able to sign up for dreamspark and download what you need from there

My school isn't listed and I don't have student email yet.

Sim wrote:My school isn't listed and I don't have student email yet.

Ouch. You can do what I did. Register at a community college and bam, your in like Flynn