XNA Game Studio Refresh 1.0 compatible with Visual C# 2008?

[Icyculyr]

I am wondering if XNA Game Studio Refresh 1.0 is compatible with Visual C# 2008?

[jmcilhinney]

I don't know but I doubt it. All the documentation says it extends C# Express 2005 with no mention of 2008. You could try it and see but I'd guess that there will be a new version of XNA Studio for VS 2008. If you follow the VS Express 2008 links there'sa Games Development link that makes no mention of XNA Studio so I doubt there's a compatible version available. It might even be that there's a non-Express version in the works to sit on top of VS 2008 Pro with support for other languages. Maybe then you could use XNA Express with VB Express too. Maybe...

[BramVandenbon]

From what i've heard XNA 2 will also work under VS 2005 and probably VS 2008.

Just to double check, I asked some people over at #xna on the irc server of EFNET:

<SpookCat> Hi room, does anybody know if XNA Game Studio Refresh 1.0 is compatible with Visual C# 2008?
<Lynch3> No SpookCat
<SpookCat> it won't Lynch3 ? or you don't know neither ?
<Lynch3> it should not work
<Lynch3> at least not without some major hacking
<SpookCat> thanks for help

[BramVandenbon]

I would just like to point out why it can't be used in VS 2005/2008 .

The content-pipeline which is used for loading resources such as models is only accessible in C# express. The framework of XNA is accessible from VS 2005 though.

I am saying this to point out that if you do all content-pipeline related stuff in C# Express and wrap it in a Code Library (DLL) you can probably do all the rest of your coding in VS 2005/2008 even with the current XNA version, just by adding a reference to the library. The disadvantage is of course that you can't add any new resources from there (such as more models).

Also just in case you came up with the "brilliant idea" of adding those resources at runtime, without use of the content pipeline: you can't, impossible. The XNA framework uses a lot of sealed classes (so that you can't override them) and it also has a lot of internal constructors so that some object (such as ModelBones) can only be instantiated from inside the XNA framework. Either way, it would be too slow.