Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0

This came out at the end of October, just under a year after version 2.0 but I'd been a bit pre-occupied to look at it until now. If you want to try writing games for Windows then this is one of the easier ways to get started as it works with the full Visual Studio 2008 or with Visual C# 2008 Express and both that and XNA Game Studio 3.0 are free.

XNA game Studio 3.0 is only 62.5 MB in size. After downloading and installing you get new projects added into your IDE. This is the full list of new features but the highlights are C# 30 support and you can now develop for the Zune. One of the things I like with Xna is the free downloadable starter kits such as the Role-Playing Game kit. This is 91.7 MB in size for Windows (there are other versions, e.g. for Xbox 360). This is complete with source code and ready to compile and run. If you want to see how a 2D Role Playing game (think Legend of Zelda) is coded, take a look. The licensing is very liberal and you can even reuse the code.

• Link to Download and Install Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition