Heres a question, is it possible to use a non 360 for windows controller?

I have a fairly cheap one that i would like to use for game development, but it isn't registered by visual studio.

Also http://code.google.com/p/x360ce/ is an emulator for non 360 controllers by putting the files in the main folder, however it doesn't read in Visual Studio 2010's main folder, would i have to be more specific and put it in the main XNA folder?

Cheers

Use SlimDX's direct input library, you access the joystick like so:

[source lang="csharp"]
Joystick joystick;
int joystickButtonCount;
int joystickAxesCount;
JoystickState joystickState, oldJoystickState;

public Game()
{
graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this);
Content.RootDirectory = "Content";
CreateDevice();
}

...

protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
{
joystickState = joystick.GetCurrentState();
bool[] buttons = joystickState.GetButtons();


Console.Clear();

Console.WriteLine("Using device: {0}\nButton count: {1}\nAxes count: {2}\n", joystick.Information.ProductName, joystickButtonCount, joystickAxesCount);


for (int i = 0; i < joystickButtonCount; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", i + 1, buttons);
}
}

void CreateDevice()
{
DirectInput dinput = new DirectInput();
foreach (DeviceInstance device in dinput.GetDevices(DeviceClass.GameController, DeviceEnumerationFlags.AttachedOnly))
{
try
{
joystick = new Joystick(dinput, device.InstanceGuid);
joystickAxesCount = joystick.Capabilities.AxesCount;
joystickButtonCount = joystick.Capabilities.ButtonCount;
break;
}
catch
{
}
}
if (joystick == null)
{
Console.WriteLine("No devices");
return; ;
}
joystick.Acquire();
foreach (DeviceObjectInstance deviceObject in joystick.GetObjects())
{
if ((deviceObject.ObjectType & ObjectDeviceType.Axis) != 0)
joystick.GetObjectPropertiesById((int)deviceObject.ObjectType).SetRange(-1000, 1000);
}
}


[/source]

Getting your axis information is a little different, if you do joystickState{dot} intellisense will show you a lot of properties, the ones with X, Y and Z on the end will give you your axis info, so to find out which one your joystick uses you'll have to print them all the console and see.

EDIT:

These two lines:

joystickAxesCount = joystick.Capabilities.AxesCount;
joystickButtonCount = joystick.Capabilities.ButtonCount;

may cause you to hang for a few seconds, so you may want to create your device on a seperate thread so your main game loop won't stall until it responds. You could also cut this out entirely and loop over the entire bool[] buttons array which I think is of size 128.