Yesterday Microsoft made the first official announcement of XNA Games Studio 2.0 at Gamefest 2007. It comes a year after the successful launch of the first version of the XNA Games Studio Development environment.

A public beta has not yet been released, but according to the XNA team’s blog anticipated enhancements will include:

• XNA Game Studio 2.0 works in all versions of Visual Studio 2005. This includes Standard and Professional, as well as many other specific editions.


• The new and improved interface makes it easier for you to manage your Xbox 360 console.


• You’ll find that managing and building content is easier and more consistent in XNA Game Studio.


• Project templates for content importers and processors.


• You can configure how content is processed with the new ability to set parameters on Content Processors.

There are also further enhancements to the XNA Framework itself, most significantly extensions to the available networking APIs for creating multiplayer games. Full details are in the team’s post.

Team Build is a new built-in build lab that automates compiling, testing, and deploying .NET 2005 solutions created using the .NET 2005 Team System. While Team Build offers a lot of powerful functionality, getting many of the features to work requires some complicated and less then intuitive workarounds. In this article Aaron Engel describes how to use Team Build to implement a powerful automated build process that pulls code from source control, builds multiple projects, executes unit tests, performs code analysis, and sends a build status report when the build completes.

Author Aaron Engel Editor David Schultz Reviewers Kunal Cheda, Teun Duynstee
Click here to read more

In this article, Brian Myers provides an introduction to the ClickOnce deployment technology introduced in Visual Studio 2005. This introduction includes an overview of ClickOnce deployment as well as its advantages and disadvantages, and a comparison between ClickOnce and Windows Installer is presented. Finally, this article includes an example of a ClickOnce deployment as well as a discussion of some issues Brian encountered while building a real world ClickOnce deployment.

Author Brian Myers Editor David Schultz Reviewers Kunal Cheda, Neil Piggot
Click here to read more

In this article Saurabh Nandu takes a look at the new debugging features in Visual Studio 2005. Specifically he will cover Edit and Continue which save time by letting you edit your code while in debug mode, Debugging Visualizers which help you visualize complex objects like DataSets, Data Tips which let you quickly look at values of your object, the Exception Assistant that provides detailed information on runtime exceptions caught in the debugger and gives prescriptive guidance to fix the exception condition.

Author Saurabh Nandu Editor David Schultz Reviewers Teun Duynstee, Kyle Roche
Click here to read more

In this article, Brian Myers explains how and why he upgraded an existing real-world Visual Basic .NET (VB .NET) project created with Visual Studio 2003 (VS2003) and SQL Server 2000 to a new Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) project along with SQL Server 2005. The first part of this article explores in general terms the reasons behind the decision to upgrade an existing production application. Brian also describes the main issues he encountered while upgrading both the VB .NET project and the database, and he identifies features of the new project structure within VS2005.

The second part of this article looks in more detail at two of the features that contributed to the motivation to upgrade this project: the new GridView control and support for encryption of configuration files.

Author Brian Myers Editor Simon Robinson Reviewers Gavin Smyth, Kunal Cheda
Click here to read more