
It's Official: XNA is dead - speeder
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/185894/Its_official_XNA_is_dead.php#.UQ_WsT8ov-I
======
sergiotapia
I used to smirk at people who claimed Microsoft constantly did this but I now
see the light.

First silverlight, now this.

Why should I invest in the Microsoft stack? I'm done. Microsoft is no longer a
platform I will work on and I will recommend open source products and
frameworks from now on.

Can you imagine spending 5 years learning XNA and becomming a guru, only to
have them yank the rug from under you?

Oh you have experience in XNA? You might as well have experience in Visual
Foxpro.

F-U Microsoft - from thousands of XNA devs worldwide (including myself)

~~~
0x0
Not defending Microsoft, but the same thing has happened many other places:

    
    
      * Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash
      * Mac OS X Carbon
      * Symbian
      * JavaFX and Java Applets
      * etc.

~~~
Legion
Nobody is suggesting Microsoft is the only company that deprecates and drops
development technologies.

But Microsoft is a chronic, habitual offender. It's a point of routine at MS
rather than an occasional occurrence.

~~~
moolcool
When they're not innovating, it's a problem. When they're throwing things
against the wall to see what sticks, it's a problem too. I feel like they
really can't win here. Is XNA really that far off from other Microsoft
platforms anyway?

~~~
eropple
It's not. You can transition to DirectX in a couple of weekends. You can
transition to OpenGL (which I would call a better move) in a week or two.

The principles are all the same, everywhere you go. The names change and the
exact implementation details differ, but it's the same stuff with a different
hat.

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elisee
XNA is dead but who cares, MonoGame is here, it supports many platforms and
it's been getting much better lately (they just released 3.0 which brings 3D
support).

I'm shipping my own real-time cooperative game-making software
(<http://craftstud.io/>) using XNA on Windows and MonoGame on Mac and although
it was very rocky at first, after submitting a few patches/bug reports and
with all the work happening, it's now in great shape.

The Linux version of MonoGame still has a few nasty issues, especially with
window-sizing but those are being worked on.

Some of the core developers are now working on reimplementing the Content
pipeline which is basically the spine of XNA and one of its big strength, so
that MonoGame can be used without relying on XNA at all. It looks like it's
well on tracks: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvYOtWdMV2Q>

~~~
jiggy2011
I don't see as much in the way of docs/tutorials/samples for monogame as much
as I do for XNA.

Are the two interchangeable enough that you can just straight up use XNA
things?

~~~
eropple
Where they are feature-complete, yes, MonoGame should behave identically to
XNA. There are landmines if you try to take any of the less-traveled paths,
but it's the same in theory.

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meaty
This is normal for Microsoft product-specific APIs. They are as stable as a
drunk unicyclist from experience.

Well to be truthful, they last forever but you never know which one you should
be using because there are about 3-4 concurrent APIs that do the same thing
which may be deprecated at zero days notice.

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ch0wn
From an outside perspective, this seems really odd. It was my impression that
XNA sparked innovation quite a bit in the indie game development world.
Hopefully MonoGame can fill some of the void this leaves.

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mythz
"The Windows tech hegemony is a graveyard. XNA. Silverlight. WPF. DirectX.
Managed C++. C++/CLI. Managed DirectX."

\-- [http://ventspace.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/directxxna-
phase-o...](http://ventspace.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/directxxna-phase-out-
continues/)

~~~
adolfojp
WPF is neither dead nor dying. It will cease to exist when it is either
replaced by a newer UI toolkit or when the desktop is completely replaced by
Metro. And neither one of those two things are very likely to happen in the
near future. And Microsoft hasn't stopped developing WPF. .NET 4.5 gave WPF a
few additions and improvements. If you want to create Windows desktop
applications WPF is still one of your best options.

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RyanMcGreal
The MSDN Magazine Camp strikes again.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html>

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jiggy2011
So if one were to write a small indie game targetted at say Windows 8 and
didn't want to mess around with writing unmanaged C++ what is the MS
recommended way for doing this?

There are third party things like Unity3D but that looks like overkill for
just making a pixel art game.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
1\. You can use Lua with MOAI. 2\. You can use HTML5 and JavaScript ... 3\.
Monogame.

...

~~~
NoPiece
I've been working on an iOS app using Gideros (also uses Lua). Windows support
is on their roadmap, and I hope they do it because I really like their
product.

<http://www.giderosmobile.com/>

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cheapsteak
In the follow-up to the blog referenced in OP

>There’s more content in today’s email regarding XNA which I don’t care to
share, thanks to a stern NDA reminder. (Ironically, when MS finally gives us
what they should be saying to the public all along, I can’t share it.)

Could someone more informed make a guess on whether that's good or bad news?

~~~
Encosia
My guess would be that they're bringing the store apps in Windows 8 to the
Xbox in the near future.

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dinkumthinkum
I didn't think it would be around this long to be honest. I'm not anti-.NET at
all but I think Microsoft tried to push .NET in all sorts of places and turn
it into the one true platform -- even though they seem to only rarely use it
themselves.

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speeder
When XNA was invented, I learned it, and then moved on quickly to other
things.

Why I learned it? Just in case someone offered me a XNA job...

Why I moved quickly to other things?

Well, because I expected that, and in fact I think it took TOO LONG to it
happen, but it happened anyway...

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kayoone
i dont really understand this. So that means that longterm, all game
programming has to use just the DirectX API for the windows platform ? Can
anyone explain which benefits XNA had over DirectX?

~~~
sergiotapia
I made making games incredibly simple. If an idiot like myself could make a
simple game on XNA, anybody could.

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pixie_
This is a big win for Mono and Xamarin.

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smurph
With MS creating a new framework for Windows 8 Apps, this makes me wonder if
.NET will die soon as well. I don't think there's anything to worry about for
the next year or so, but if it's 2014 and there's been no talk of .Net 5.0...

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muyuu
"The company has now further explained the situation to Polygon, assuring
developers that DirectX development will continue"

Same thing they said about Silverlight or XNA just within months of
discontinuing them.

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savethejets
Could one infer that indie games for the next xbox console are dead as well?

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polskibus
But why did it die?

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S128K
Note the date

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seivan
Only portion of the C#/.NET/VS I was OK with. Even said so on my resume, now
dead. It sucks, because it was actually pretty decent. This coming from a
hardcore Cocoa lover.

"Can you imagine spending 5 years learning XNA and becomming a guru, only to
have them yank the rug from under you?"

Maybe open source, the Web and JS is a better place to rely on, but I just
love having a compiler.

~~~
lukehorvat
I'm curious - what exactly do you not like about C#?

~~~
seivan
I don't dislike C# or .NET, I dislike Windows. And yes, I am aware of Mono.

