Codetopia

This ZIP archive contains source code from the book, XNA Game Studio Express: Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360, by Joseph Hall. The following paragraphs describe the changes that have been made to the code since it was first release with the book.

Housekeeping

I updated the logic in frmPrerequisites.cs to check for XNA 2.0, and I fixed a couple of bugs that were reported in the forums on PCs that don't have pre-XNA 2.0 runtimes installed. This version will likely fail when a new major version of the XNA runtime is released and the user has never installed a 2.0-or-earlier version, though. I didn't want to waste too much time on this project. I doubt that a single reader has even opened it.

Intuitive File Names

I used longer, more descriptive filenames for the solution files, project files, and directory names. The new names make it much easier to locate the source code for a specific chapter. This may cause issues if you do your development in a deeply-nested subdirectory, like the default Visual Studio project folder of "C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\".

I suggest creating a folder off the root of the drive from which you wish to develop your XNA games. I use "C:\projects\" on my laptop, and "E:\projects\" on my desktop.

ZIP Anatomy

All of the ZIP files which host the book's source code use a parallel directory structure. I expect the user to download the ZIP files into a common directory, then extract the files from each ZIP directly into that directory, preserving the ZIP file's internal directory structure. For example, if you download PT1_CH04.zip, PT1_CH07.zip, and PT2_18.zip into the "C:\projects\" directory on your local PC, and then extract the files to that same folder, you should have the following directory structure on your local drive.

   C:\projects\Part 1 - Introduction\CH04 - Graphics 2D\
   C:\projects\Part 1 - Introduction\CH07 - Input GamePad\
   C:\projects\Part 2 - Genre Studies\CH18 - Board Games\