Tag: form

XNA 2.0 and Windows Forms

I’ve been trying out XNA 2.0 recently and sadly, my former method of using the internal WindowsGameForm and play with it to add all the desired controls has seemingly stopped working. :(

Fortunately, Pedro Güida on CodeProject has found a much simpler way to achieve that, and which enables the use of the Windows Forms Designer instead of adding all the controls by hand like I did. I’m currently implementing that in the Fez editor and I encourage you to do the same! It’s the cleanest method I’ve seen yet.

I’m mostly posting this because my article on Windows Forms has been the most popular on my blog since I posted it, and I wouldn’t like people to take the time to implement it and find out it just doesn’t work anymore. I’ll put a note on the original article that says “XNA 1.0 Refresh only!”, if people are still using that.

The aforementioned article also presents how to use XNA with Visual Studio 2008, WPF projects and even Silverlight, so it’s a good read in any case.

How To (Properly) Use Windows Forms With XNA

Only works with XNA GSE 1.0 Refresh, not 2.0!

Update : See this post for a working sample!

Here’s something I had some difficulty doing “gracefully” with XNA : force a custom render device and user controls in the window while still using the Game framework. It’s quite easy to initialize XNA in a Managed DirectX fashion but you lose the links to the graphics device manager, the content pipeline and a lot of very useful (and well written) code behind the Game class.

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