I just don't understand Microsoft. XNA was probably one of .net's greatest contributions. Lately however Microsoft have had no news on XNA and the XNA team seems dispersed.

During Microsoft's //build/ so far I think XNA has had no official mention, except for attendees actually asking the speaker themselves on the future of XNA, their reply is always indirect. You know what the funny is though? Almost half of the questions asked in the game design event were related to XNA http://channel9.msdn...uild/2012/2-106.

Microsoft should hurry up say something something about this issue.

I don't get it! What has the game developers response to XNA not done to not impress microsoft? Did they think XNA would be used for AAA games or something, obviously that would not happen. Why stop XNA?

XNA will not be included in the WP8 SDK.

I am currently developing a desktop game in XNA, but will most probably move it over to MonoGame which is the only thing backing me up at the moment. I will definitely do it once MonoGame has the content pipeline for XNA.

What do you guys think about the future of XNA?

be patient

Years are passing.

It was obvious from the outside that XNA came from a small, mismanaged team, who didn't have a lot to work with. It was someone's pet project, and the company never really fully got behind it. People at MS have said that there were lots of politics, and a lot of their programming product teams were not co-operating with each other. It shows.

The Creator's Club subscription model was poorly thought out, and ass backwards. A lot of people in the MS customer support didn't even know what it was. Payments were constantly late, and numbers were missing. Game reviews relied on other gamers testing out and reviewing them before they could go up, because no one could bother hiring staff.

XNA got bastardized every time the marketing guys wanted to push something different on us. They added Zune support, wrote a bunch of stuff about programming for it, and then got us excited to all go out and buy Zune HDs. Then they quickly yanked the Zunes from the market and killed support for them in XNA. Way to pull the rug out from everyone. Anyone who spent time, money, and effort trying to do a good ZuneHD game got burned badly.

Then when Windows Phone 7 came out, they changed up the API again, and the 360 suffered for it. [color=#a9a9a9]"Hey guys, remember those things the Xbox 360 GPU could do really fast in hardware? We dropped support for it so the API fit in better with WP7. Here's a new slow way to do it in software".

Then the team all got re-assigned to different projects, and stopped talking about XNA like it never existed.

So why be patient and why even bother?

When XNA existed, no one at MS knew what it was, why it existed, or where it was going. It was all reactionary, and the users got jerked around constantly. Years have passed, and MS still has nothing but bullshit answers to hand out. They only ever used XNA to treat like guinea pigs to test all their half baked ideas. I know the API team members cared about it, but the company as a whole didn't.

Go and use a stable API that knows what it wants to be and where it's going. Use an API that exists for the purpose of making software, and not product pitching.

Thanks for the reply Dark. Do you think MonoGame will evolve beyond XNA 4.0? Otherwise should I just dump my project and try reconstruct it in SharpDX?

No comment? I never followed MonoGame. When it first came out, it was a reactionary API to counter the announcement of XNA GameStudio. Looking at the site now. has it matured to not being a 'me too' OS alternative to XNA yet?

I don't know what C# APIs are viable at the moment, other than say, Unity3D. I know there are lots of framworks that wrap up OpenGL and DirectX, but as far as I know, they are just hobby projects and can disappear, or be discontinued any second.

In my case I used XNA as a 'toy' to gain some knowledge, and then I moved to a 'naked' API. I chose openGL. I really don't care right now what will happen to XNA, but if something new appears I will definitely check it out. I would suggest as people above, if you want to stay with C# go SharpDX, MonoGames or SlimDX.

I'm currently in this position, using XNA to gain sufficient knowledge before moving on to something else.

I wanted to ask about Monogame... its libraries have same structure as XNA? Meaning that I can freely convert my projects to Monogame once content pipeline arrives without modifying too much to become compatible?

Thanks for the replies everyone. After reading everyone's comments I will probably continue to create my game, eventually port it over to MonoGame. After I finish that I will move onto C++ and DirectX in the future (because obviously as MikeBMcL mentions, any serious game programmer will eventually learn that).

Xanather.

Geese my hatred towards Microsoft is slowly building...