The biggest thing to check for is whether your custom content assembly is referenced by the content project.  If it is, then the next thing I'd double check is whether the attributes have been applied correctly to the importer/processor/writer/etc. classes

lol.  Looks like your issue is here: cannonballs = new GameObject[maxCannonBalls];             for (int i = 0; i < maxCannonBalls; i++)             {                 cannonballs[i] = new GameObject(Content.Load<Texture2D>(                     "Sprites\\cannon"));     ...

this is a great article on this topic :-)http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2009/07/14/the-perils-of-microbenchmarking.aspx

You won't need to use the ref keyword because  Ship is defined as a class.  in C#, all classes are Reference types, while all structs are Value types.  Reference types will always be passed by reference, while value types will always be copied by value unless you use the ref keyword :-) As a side note, all arrays (even if they're an array ...

The problem you're noticing is a common one, one that Shawn Hargreaves explains in great detail here:http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/detail_blur/detail_blur.html Whenever the frequency at which you are sampling some data reaches half the repeat rate of that data, you have a problem. This is a magical value called the Nyquist frequency, and when ...

[quote user="Shawn Hargreaves"]... when it comes to testing your graphics, you really need to draw some stuff and then check that it drew the right image for the test to be valid. For that, you need to create an actual GraphicsDevice, rather than just mocking all the graphics API to noop. [/quote] Shameless plug :-P I have a project out ...

ok, I stopped being lazy and searched for what I was talking about.  Here's one example: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/XnaFormHost.aspx?fid=443094&df=90&mpp=25&noise=3&sort=Position&view=Quick&select=2156543 In that article, he talks about how you can get a control instance using the exposed Handle ...

it's been a while since I looked at this, but can't you just cast the game's window/form to a "Form" object and set the requisite properties?

ahh, this scenario happens often.  Usually when one has added a large swath of code, and then, upon testing looks on as absolutely nothing seems to be happening :-P  Honestly, the best way to troubleshoot things like this is to reduce the code that is executing down to something very minimal until you get something on the screen.  So in your case, ...

Welcome to the creator's club :-)  A few notes/points on your questions You generally don't have to worry about the contents of the "Main" method.  All it really does is initialize and start the game, which is contained in "Game1" The "Game1" class is just the default name, you can change it to ...