Last week I installed Microsoft XNA on my computer and the experience was so horrible I had to blog about it. If you don't know what XNA is, XAN is Microsoft's bold, and from my first look, very good attempt at creating a cross platform gaming framework and toolset for .NET. Cross platform between Windows and XBox 360, but pretty cool none-the less and free. You download XNA here and Wikipedia has a good description of that it is here.
So on to my experience. I downloaded the setup for XNA from Microsoft and ran it. It required Visual C# Express SP1. So I downloaded and installed Visual C# Express. It wasn't SP1 so I went to the help menu and ran update. Well my default web browser is Firefox and update doesn't work in Firefox. Since the page was a redirected page with the error updated couldn't run in Firefox, I had to go the history copy and paste the URL and run IE. It turns out the update was just the Windows update and I wasn't even provided with a Visual C# Express update 1. So I went to Google and searched for "Visual C# Express update". The first link had the updates but try and find the correct one from this list.
Why the author of the article can't put another column in the table with the produce name but instead requires the user cross reference between two tables is beyond me. I can't believe the user experience from the largest software manufacturer is this bad. Well actually I can, I just don't want to. You get what you pay for.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Experience of Installing Microsoft XNA
2 comments:
I agree (a bit). Matters are even worse if you have a legit, full version of Visual Studio installed (it took me about a week to get all the files that I need) but in the end I got things working.... Now I only have to find the time to get my first game together (and sell it so I can buy that XBox to try it on :-))
Bart,
I also have a full version of Visual Studio installed. I decided early in the process to install Vistual C# Express and not try to use Visual Studio. I didn't care about C# anyway. What I wanted was the XNA assemblies and tools to use with Delphi for .NET.
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