XNA Game Studio

XNA Game Studio 4.0 was released in the fall of 2010. (From now on, let’s just shorten this to “XNA” or “XNA 4.0”, even though “Game Studio” is the name of the SDK, and “XNA” is the overall product name.) XNA 4.0 saw several new improvements to the graphics system, but due to the hardware of the Xbox 360, XNA is still based on Direct3D 9 (not the newer versions, Direct3D 10 or 11). This is actually very good news for a beginner, since Direct3D 9 is much easier to learn than 10 or 11. Although XNA abstracts the C++-based DirectX libraries into the C#-based XNA Framework, there is still much DirectX-ish code that you have to know in order to build a capable graphics engine in XNA. While XNA 4.0 added WP7 support, it simultaneously dropped support for Zune (the portable multimedia and music player).