Month of December, 2006

XNA Game studio was released recently after nine months of community preview (public beta testing). Some of you might remember Managed DirectX and how easy it was to develop games using the .NET framework with it. Managed DirectX was a group of wrappers that enabled .NET programmers to interact with and use the advanced graphical capabilities of DirectX in Windows. Prior to Managed DirectX, .NET programmers used to directly P/Invoke into DirectX's DLLs and we all know how painful it is to do that especially to beginners.

After releasing Managed DirectX, Microsoft started developing Managed DirectX 2.0 -- a version with many improvements over the previous version of the framework. After starting public Beta testing of the 2.0 version, Microsoft decided that support and development will be ceased for it. Many felt betrayed after investing allot of time learning and developing programs that target the next version of Managed DirectX 2.0. However, immediately after this announcement, Microsoft announced the XNA framework.