Hi there, first thing I wanna say is that I've been watching this forum for some time and I really liked how all of this is organized and how this community works. I hope someday it's me helping you, not the other way round.

To the point:

I've been thinking about developing games for some time and I got a bit acquainted with C#, C++. I stopped coding in both, because I really felt like I was doing it horrribly wrong (though I made a few console games and even one game based on Forms). None of my work was any close to being satisfying so I quit, even though I was really, really excited about the whole XNA thing. I switch to high-level languages such as python and ruby. I really liked both of them for being accessible to everyone with many tutorials/guides/information-rich documentation.

Thing is:

I'm kind of motivated to go all the way with C# with XNA, but I heard MS is dropping support for XNA (VC# 2012 doesn't support it), so is this still viable, or should I just leave it and go somewhere else? Is there any good literature about C# and XNA? Can something teach me how to code the right way so I wouldn't have any future problems thanks to bad habits?

I understand all of this could take days, weeks, months or even years in my case, but I want to try, even if it's learning it the hard way.

I am pretty much in the same postition as you.

But there are a bunch of C# and XNA tutorials out there.

Even though MS has stopped the xna support, doesn't mean it's dead. Take a look at "monogame".

I know some professional game devs use, and prefer, C#. So don't dissmiss it if you like it. I sure wont.

I would check out http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/xna-tutorials for a tutorial set.

and

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920013709.do

http://www.amazon.com/XNA-4-0-Game-Development-Example/dp/1849690669

for books. As mollekake said, check out monogame It's an awesome library that's pretty much XNA with most of its classes so far. It's still in development but many games have been released using monogame. (check the site for more on that) I'm currently going through monogame learning it and it's great. it's pretty much XNA honestly.

Both of you got me convinced I should dump VC# and go Mono, I guess I'll have a look, maybe this is the thing for me. I heard about it before, but it seemed focused on developing to consoles/mobile devices, while I wanted to dev to PC. Still I'll check it out, I'm probably wrong. Will check out mono/monogame today and stick to it, maybe this will make a difference.

Any online reference, documentation, books are welcome. I promise to check out those you posted so far.

Thank you mollekake, Inuyashakagome16!

Yup! Also with XNA/Monogame remember that Terraria and Bastion are XNA games. And they are on PC and XBLA. (Terraria is on the way soon I guess to XBLA?) So you can make PC games and console games with XNA/Monogame.

Just an FYI, Monogame is the Framework, you still use VC#, and both Monogame and XNA 4 can be installed and developed with VS 2012.

Just an FYI, Monogame is the Framework, you still use VC#, and both Monogame and XNA 4 can be installed and developed with VS 2012.

You're right, my bad - I didn't make myself clear:

Will check out mono/monogame today and stick to it,

What I meant was using Monogame along with mono and monodevelop - thought that was worth a try.

But you got me interested in this whole VS2012 thing, I heard you can use XNA 4.0 with VS2012, but so far I've seen people recommending sticking to VS2010. What is your opinion? I know I can (go with VS2012) but the question is: should I?

and

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920013709.do

http://www.amazon.com/XNA-4-0-Game-Development-Example/dp/1849690669

for books.

Just thought I'd chime in--that second one is the best XNA book I've found so far. It's one of the few that actually gets as far as tilemaps, and even walks you through building a winform-based map editor, which is miles ahead of where most of the others I've skimmed through seem to stop (a lot of them are basically "this is a spriteBatch, here's a primitive way to check for collisions with other sprites, the end," or even worse, "this is a spriteBatch, now lets move on to 3D and not teach you anything about that either").

Haven't gotten a chance to look through the first one yet, but I've got a few books from that same publisher (I love how easy it is to tell, but what will they do if they run out of different-looking animals?) and they've all been pretty decent. I've found C# 4.0 in a Nutshell particularly helpful as a reference (I see they're on 5.0 now, though).

But yes, XNA is great and Microsoft was foolish to drop it--their lower level employees probably feel the same way, but the execs are so disconnected from reality that they don't even notice the community refusing to let it go and continuing development on their own (monoGame). Honestly, though, an open source framework is going to be better for all of us in the long term, so this is probably a blessing in disguise.