Brandon Bloom:

I have no idea what the team is planning, but it is my suspicion that whatever solution they come up with will certainly not be 360 compatable and will live in a seperate, Windows-only assembly.

If I had my way, it would take the form of a XnaView control which you could simply drag out of the toolbox onto a form. That would be nice because then you could easily make multiple viewports and such, but is actually substantially more sophisticated to setup and doesn't directly match the semantics of the Game class.

It's never as easy as it first looks, especially when you have to write framework code that is going to be used by such a wide range of people. Even the seemingly simplist things have complications which can easily be overlooked by those who are not accustom to the framework-writing frame of mind. For example, a lot of people asked "Why isn't the chat pad supported in v1? Isn't it just a keyboard? It should work the same as any keyboard". The response was "because you can have more than one of them" and people said "oooooh. right." :-)

I made a XNA Viewport control that you could drag out of the toolbox onto a form. I was trying to get XNA to work with VS2005 in VB and I thought it'd be handy to be able to host XNA as a control on a form. The project kinda died due to not being able to use the content pipeline with VB, but the control works... at least with my tests and limited knowledge of XNA. Anybody's welcome to check it out.

Well, this is another way of doing this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc72eYcQODc

source:

XNAFormsEditor

I've been writing an article for a week or so regarding how to use XNA GS and VS2008.

In one of the sections (entitled "XNA And WinForms: A Simple Approach") I present a way to avoid all the "fuss". Still, I consider that getting control of the GraphicDevice is the best option, but as I say in the article, I'm lazy ;)

http://www.thecodeproject.com/KB/game/XNA_And_Beyond.aspx

BTW, this is my first article for "The Code Project", so please be nice ... :)

Gibba:

The last bit of code was very nice, although it doesnt quite serve my purpose and im too much of a c# noob to get it working.

I've created my own form and i want to display the XNA environment in a picturebox or equivalent, so i can place controls down the sides.  Problem is the main XNA window still opens as well as my form, although the XNA window is not updated.

Anyway to stop the main XNA window opening and use a control to display the XNA on my custom form?

To 'hide' the window simply put the following code in your Initialize method:

protected override void Initialize()
        {
            // TODO: Add your initialization logic here

            base.Initialize();

            Form gameWindowForm = (Form)Form.FromHandle(this.Window.Handle);
            gameWindowForm.Shown += new EventHandler(gameWindowForm_Shown);
        }

void gameWindowForm_Shown(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            ((Form)sender).Hide();
        }