Installing XNA Game Studio
To use XNA Game Studio, you can use any of the Visual Studio SKUs, including Visual C# Express.
To get started, complete the following steps:
- Run the XNAGS30_setup.msi file from Microsoft’s website. The file can be downloaded by clicking the top link on the XNA Creators Club Online – Downloads website (http://creators.xna.com/en-US/downloads).
- Click Next to get past the setup welcome screen.
- The next screen is the End-User License Agreement. If you accept the terms, select the check box and click Next.
- A notification dialog box opens that allows the Windows Firewall to have rules added to it. These rules allow communication between the computer and the Xbox 360, as well as allow for communication between network games. This can be seen in Figure 1.7.
Figure 1.7 XNA Game Studio modifies the Windows Firewall so an Xbox 360 and the PC can talk to each other. It also allows network games created with XNA to communicate.
- Click Install to continue. The next screen shows the progress of the installation.
- Once all of the required files are installed, you are presented with a completion dialog box. Simply click Finish to exit the setup.
After you have installed XNA Game Studio, you can go to the Start menu and see that it added a few more items than those contained in the IDE. Make sure to take the time and read through some of the XNA Game Studio documentation. There is also a Tools folder that contains a couple of tools we will be looking at later. We will discuss the XACT tool in Chapter 7, “Sound and Music,” and the XNA Framework Remote Performance Monitor for Xbox 360 application in Chapter 3, “Performance Considerations.” Go ahead and open the Visual C# Express or Visual Studio IDE.
When you installed XNA Game Studio, it added properties to Visual Studio to allow it to behave differently under certain circumstances. Mainly it added some templates (which we will look at shortly) as well as the ability for Visual Studio to handle content via the XNA Content Pipeline. It also added a way for you to send data to your Xbox 360, as you will see in the next chapter.