Earlier this week I attended the Microsoft Gamefest conference. I saw a demo of "XNA Game Framework Express", which is a programming environment and class library for writing games that run on Windows and Xbox 360.

The demo of the development environment was very impressive. They had a lot of nice simple components that every simple game needs:

• A FPS counter display
• A camera that works with the game controller, good for previewing your world
• A menu system that works with the game controller

And everything worked similarly to how the "Forms Designer" works in Visual Studio. You just drag-and-drop the components into place and then double-click on properties to write event handlers.

You write your game as a series of components, each of which has an "Initialize", "Update", and "Draw" method. There does not currently seem to be any "scene graph" that your components fit into, they just get called in the order you specify at design time.

There are also some class libraries - they wrap up the DirectX APIs and make them .NET friendly. (These APIs replace the now-discontinued Managed DirectX 2.0 library.)

The beta (for Windows) will be out in September. I can hardly wait.

XNA Team Blog