Don't understand me wrong, i love XNA and i bough 8 books, related of learning xna, hlsl and other stuff for programming games.

while working on my first game, i noticed that there are no real documentation of xna in the MSDN and using the HELP came with the xna.

there is no much info, more like few tutorials and nothing else.

for example, i've waisted 3 days to find out how is the format structure of xml file in xna and what are the elements to represent Lists of custom classes, and with no success.

the main reason i choose xna is because i said to my self , this is microsft and i'll have all the support i need. before choosing xna, i was testing and reading about other SDKs, and to see that the support and documentations is better on part of them, is frustrating.

also, this forums seems kind of dead, and no updates or new tutorials from microsoft for a long time now.

i really like to know, if microsoft is series about this xna stuff and if i just waisted my learning time and money on books.

There is extensive documentation, IMO (e.g., http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa187935.aspx)  but my frustration with much of it is that it is poorly written where descriptions of terms are just extended versions of a terms title.  BasicDirectionalLight = provides methods for manipulating the directional lights..  that does little to inform.   Much of the documentations appears to assume some level of familiarity with direct x as well.  The users, especially the hobbyists to whom this endeavor was largely targeted, would be well served if the documentation were expanded to include a generic description of each element (e.g., provide a description of where a particular class is useful in its description from the games perspective ) as well as code snippets with each element.  

It starts off really well getting you up and going with a spinning spaceship that makes buzz noises, but there is a huge gap between that and what can be done with little guidance in between.   I feel like I've been able to accomplish quite a bit in the last several months with my background, but with that background I would have probably quit by now had it not been for the help in the forums.

I think XNA is very much alive, and though I would hate to admit to a tat of laziness, its official documentation assumes too much on the part of the reader. 

Best,

Byron

Well, XNA is still very much alive, including the Zune support with the latest version.. The forum may be 'dead', but you have to think of it this way. XNA is new.. And you have to admit, a LOT of people still see C# and managed languages as a bad choice for games and they stick with C++ and stuff they are more familiar with. Given a little time, it will most definately pick up, it just needs a few people out there to really show how XNA can shine. As far as microsoft putting out tutorials, They put out some good samples that cover a good variety of topics, but you cant expect them to really do a 'how to make a game in 30 days' tutorial. That kind of stuff is best left to the community of which there is an abundance of tutorials out there.

If you need help with a particular topic, post on the forums. Not only here, but you can post at gamedev.net or ziggyware.com for example... Gamedev has a very active community and while its mostly focused on c++, there are a lot of XNA people over there that are willing to help out!

I wish you the best with XNA!

I think if you have the basic c# knowledge then you can start to beging learn xna.

There are lots tutorials avilable to start with.

Learning videos from microsoft

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/bb245766.aspx

http://channel8.msdn.com/Tags/XNA/

Another video tutorial

http://www.xnatutorial.com/?page_id=46

Also video tutorial on Dicrectx/c# if you want to go more further.

but these not related to xna.

http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2006/11/06/997852.aspx

 

and few links to tutorial sites

http://ziggyware.com/news.php

http://www.riemers.net/
http://www.xnadevelopment.com/

and myblog- http://uditha.wordpress.com/

And there many oteher lerning sites are avileble.

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure how much more alive you need something to be before you consider it alive. I've never seen a product or the team behind it more alert an alive than the XNA team from Microsoft.

It sounds like you had some frustration with some documentation. I personally have never had any complaints, but if you were stuck on something, that's why these forums are here. These forums are highly active with most questions never going over a day for an unanswered question. And members of the Microsoft XNA team are right in there answering a question.

So if you were stuck, you missed one of the best resources Microsoft has provided to you. These forums.

As for samples, if you've noticed a new XNA 3.0 CTP was just released. Working on newer versions of the framework with new features and support for new hardware (the Zune in this case) is obviously going to have an impact on the ebb and flow of tutorials and samples from Microsoft. The community (which Microsoft has helped build and encourage) however has not been in-active during that slow time and there are a ton of new samples, game demos and tutorials from all over the community.

So no, XNA is not dead and I'm actually surprise that's even a question someone would have at this point. Have you seen this community? It's very much alive and growing.

For learning xna first you can start with video tutorials.

If you have the basic c# knowledge i think thats the best way.

Video tutorial from microsoft.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/bb245766.aspx

http://channel8.msdn.com/Tags/XNA/

And if need to know more about DirectX/c#

http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2006/11/06/997852.aspx

othere video tutoral sites.

http://www.xnatutorial.com/?page_id=46

XNA tutorial sites.

http://ziggyware.com/news.php

http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/series1.php

my blog-http://uditha.wordpress.com

And also there lots of tutorial sites are avilable.

you can find that on this forum.

 

 

George Clingerman:

I'm not sure how much more alive you need something to be before you consider it alive. I've never seen a product or the team behind it more alert an alive than the XNA team from Microsoft.

It sounds like you had some frustration with some documentation. I personally have never had any complaints, but if you were stuck on something, that's why these forums are here. These forums are highly active with most questions never going over a day for an unanswered question. And members of the Microsoft XNA team are right in there answering a question.

So if you were stuck, you missed one of the best resources Microsoft has provided to you. These forums.

As for samples, if you've noticed a new XNA 3.0 CTP was just released. Working on newer versions of the framework with new features and support for new hardware (the Zune in this case) is obviously going to have an impact on the ebb and flow of tutorials and samples from Microsoft. The community (which Microsoft has helped build and encourage) however has not been in-active during that slow time and there are a ton of new samples, game demos and tutorials from all over the community.

So no, XNA is not dead and I'm actually surprise that's even a question someone would have at this point. Have you seen this community? It's very much alive and growing.

well the furoms are kind of dead, and the Creatros.xna.com has not been updated since the first time i came to it, so it's not seem to be much of alive.

frustrated, yes. i made an xna game in a week, after not programming for 5 years. the game looks great, and you can take a look on some movies i posted. i already programming HLSL and had no problems learning C#, even though i prefer c++. so, I'm not the problem here, and if i had docs, i didn't had to post questions on the forums.

you wanna see bad docs, just look on the docs for XML and tell me what you find? maybe you can find for me what i missing? how the hell i can program or write down class for uploading levels using xml, if there is no a single line of documentation of how is the structure of the xml and what is the Entities need to build xml file for xna.

in my case, i need to know how to build xna structure for holding List of Level class ? any info about that will be great helpfull.

i using this forum. but you know that it's not an optimal way to work. if on any info I'm missing from the docs, i need to go to the forums, then i'll finish my game in few years from now.

xna 3.0 is already released? i really would like to take a look at it.

as i said, i really love XNA and hope for the best. but the Docs need to be rewriten so ppl can actually progress without beeing needing this forums a replacement.

i don't need to know the basics, i'm already in a middle of a game I'm building.

my complain is about the docs of the XNA and that without the Tutorials and/or books you can't do anything based on the docs only.

I'm not sure how you think the forums are dead... almost no question goes unanswered - your own thread had 4 decent relies in under 3 hours - there are almost 60,000 posts in 17 months (thats over 100 per day) - we have several members of the actual XNA dev team in here (find me ANY MS forum with that) and we moderate them very tightly to keep people on topic.

The XML docs are not part of the XNA framework - they are part of .Net. If you have issues with those then there is another set of forums over on MSDN which are (mostly) even more active than this one http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?SiteID=1

I'm also kind of lost by what you mean about 'building XML files for XNA'. XML is an open file format... YOU decide what goes in it and YOU decide how to store things. Sure some people have made some samples but XNA is not a game engine that predefines input files for game worlds. If you want that functionality you should probably check out some engines such as Blade3D or TorqueX

If you have more specific feedback other than 'the docs need to be rewritten' then put them in http://connect.microsoft.com the XNA docs team love to get constructive feedback.

 

i dont know what you expect.. but xna is far far from dead.. .. it is very much alive and every day is better..i dont know what kind of forum activity you expect  as this is a technical forum not a general off topic talk forum

i feel very comfortable with all the help and the tremendous amounts of samples and even complete games in source code form for you to look around that exist for xna

and about main page of the creators club i think it has been only 2 months without any news since the community arcade announcement which was like the 20 or 21 of febraury and now the XNA 3.0 CTP release

so i dont know or understand your expectations

c64days:

i don't need to know the basics, i'm already in a middle of a game I'm building. my complain is about the docs of the XNA and that without the Tutorials and/or books you can't do anything based on the docs only.

^{XNA is not RPG Maker}

Blind Renderer:

c64days:

i don't need to know the basics, i'm already in a middle of a game I'm building. my complain is about the docs of the XNA and that without the Tutorials and/or books you can't do anything based on the docs only.

^{XNA is not RPG Maker}

Of course not, but there's no reason to be condescending like that when, in my opinion, the OP has a valid claim. The structure for creating XML files that are compatible with the default XML content pipeline importer is not very well defined in the documentation. Trust me, I've looked around. I even wrote a tutorial to try and help fill that gap. I would love to see some better documentation surrounding this XML issue. It comes up frequently enough that clearly there is a lack of information or guidance on it.