Chapter 2. Getting Started with XNA

For the next few chapters, we will look at the XNA environment and learn all we need to know to use it for displaying graphics, reading user input, and playing music and sound effects. XNA is in some ways a more straightforward approach to games programming than Silverlight, offering a very draw-things-to-the-screen approach to its graphics rendering, rather than Silverlight's somewhat more complex control hierarchies. Its entire focus is on games and game programming, whereas Silverlight is a general-purpose graphical interface rather than a gaming engine. XNA also takes full advantage of the graphical hardware acceleration built into the device, whereas Silverlight performs a lot more of its processing using ...

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