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XNA and DirectX Tutorials |
Welcome to the tutorials on DirectX and XNA. As you can see in the table of contents on the right, this site contains tutorials in a variety of languages. This page was written to provide some comments on the differences between these flavors.
When you click on one of those languages, you’ll see they’re subdivided into Series, which again consist of several chapters. Each chapter puts its focus on a new XNA (or DirectX) related concept.
Below you can see the screenshot of the final chapter of the 3 Series:
Let’s first discuss the different languages:
XNA using C#
Released in December 2006, XNA is intended to push the ease of game programming to the extreme. XNA is new wrapper around native DirectX. As development on a new version of Managed DirectX has been cancelled, XNA can be thought of as the new version of Managed DirectX. Although the code is not 100% the same, it is VERY similar. No windows event handling, built-in update and drawing loops and XBOX360 compatibility are just some of the some of the reasons why XNA will become the future of DirectX game programming.
XNA is built on top of DirectX 9, but I would be very surprised if it wouldn’t fit on the next version of DirectX, the Vista-only DirectX 10. Currently, I have ported all 3 Series of DirectX tutorials to XNA, and future series will be produced in XNA.
DirectX using C#
Before the release of XNA, this section used to be the main section of this site, and it contains 3 full Series. DirectX for C#, together with DirectX for VB, is also called Managed DirectX. This is a wrapper around the native calls to DirectX. Because of this wrapper, it is arguable that there is a slight loss of performance, but the ease of programming and resource management greatly compensates for this.
DirectX using C++
Writing a program using C++ gives you the possibility to use native DirectX calls. Although most professional games are written in C++, this language is not suited for writing DirectX tutorials, as C++-related problems would distract beginning programmers from the DirectX aspect. I have ported the first Series to C++ for those feeling the need to write a DirectX enabled program in C++.
DirectX using Visual Basic
Also part of Managed DirectX, coding DirectX using Visual Basic is user-friendly. TzeJian Chear kindly provided us with some chapters that can be used to get you into coding DirectX using Visual Basic.
- Website design & XNA + DirectX code : Riemer Grootjans -
©2003 - 2008 Riemer Grootjans
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2007 - 2008 MVP Award
DirectX - XNA
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