XNA is a play on words. It stands for “It’ s Not an Acronym.”
Microsoft’ s world is so full of acronyms that it decided to create a name that looks like an acronym, Now thats just a joke.
But XNA is much more than that. The innovative concept of bringing to the average programmer the power to create his own games for the Xbox 360 ,Zune players,PCs.Thus XNA is a great technological innovation, which comes from Microsoft with lot efforts so as to establish an active community for game creators (joining both theWindows and Xbox 360 game programming communities) and also to establish programs in the academic area to support institutions that wish to create courses using retail Xbox 360 consoles.
NOW WHO MAKES PROFIT THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!
These efforts become obvious when we notice that Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.1
can be downloaded at no charge from Microsoft’s site, at Microsoft.XNA
Microsoft also offers free game content, including video tutorials, starter kits (ready-
made games, which can be freely customized), sample codes, and other support content at the
XNA Creator’ s Club:Creaters.XNA..com
The last step in making Microsoft LIVE known as one Stop of Games aka “Youtube of Games” is the ability to upload the games you created to Xbox LIVE and distribute (or even sell) your games
to anyone in the world with a LIVE connection.
So no WONDER the non professional game
programmer community is so excited, with XNA Game Studio launching and the frequent updates with new content on the XNA Creator’s Club site!http://creators.xna.com/
The greatest secret behind XNA’ s success is that it’s easy—much easier than any
console programming application programming interface (API), and also easier than any
Windows game programming API, because of the abstraction it provides for details that
you need to worry about in other APIs.
XNA uses the same integrated development environment (IDE)—XNA Game Studio Express—and the same framework for developing games both for Windows and Xbox 360 platforms, which ensures a high degree of compatibility.
However, there are differences in the lower layer. The Xbox 360 console runs a
compact version of the .NET Framework, so you must be careful: not all functions avail-
able in Windows will run on the Xbox 360.
We’ll address all this in more detail as we progress through our upcoming posts, but you can always find the latest information about XNA architecture at Microsoft’ s XNA site and at the XNA Creator’ s Club site.
Some useful resources