Getting & Installing the Framework and Development Environment

When developers wanted to write a program on the very first computers, they had to take the back off and actually change the wires in the machine. Fortunately, things have moved on, and now you can use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to create your code. An IDE gets its name because it provides a single place where you can perform the entire creative process of code development. In an IDE, you can write a program by using the built-in text editor, you can run the program and see what it does, and you can also debug the program, which means you stop it and try to find out why it is not doing what you wanted it to. The IDE you are going to use in these tutorials for developing XNA games is one of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions, specifically the Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. This is a version of the hugely powerful Microsoft Visual Studio product, which is used by professional developers all over the world. At this point, I'm assuming that you have already installed Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and have it running on your machine. If not, you can download it for free from http://www.microsoft.com/express/2005/download/default.aspx. The setup procedure is quite straightforward, and at the end of the process you will be asked to register your copy. Registration does not cost you any money and actually gives you access to even more free resources. There are a number of other Express products that you can install also. You can use these in addition to XNA Game Studio 2.0, but they are not required to create games.

Note: If you have other versions of Visual Studio on your machine, you can also use these to write XNA games as long as they include the C# development environment. However, you must make sure that your version of Visual Studio has the latest version of the service packs installed. The XNA Creators Club website (http://creators.xna.com) has the most up-to-date information on service packs and Visual Studio versions.

Once you have got your development environment working, you need to install the XNA Framework. This binds itself to Visual Studio and provides it with all extra libraries needed to create and deploy games. You can download the XNA Framework software from http://creators.xna.xom/Education/newtoxna.aspx. The installation is straightforward.

Note: Once you install XNA on your system, you will find a customized version of Visual C# Express in your Program files under Microsoft XNA Game Studio 2.0. For the purpose of these tutorials, every time I refer to XNA Game Studio 2.0 from now on, I really mean the customized version of Visual C# 2005 Express Edition.


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