XNA Game Studio Express and Windows Vista

Michael Klucher
Program Manager – XNA Game Studio

Many people have written to us or inquired on the forums about support for Windows Vista™. I thought it would be best to clear up the speculation and let everyone know our plans for Windows Vista support for XNA Game Studio Express.

XNA Game Studio Express is tightly integrated with Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. As such, we are highly dependent on the features and capabilities of Visual C# Express and, more generally, Visual Studio 2005.

Visual C# Express is supported on Windows Vista if both the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista are applied. Currently SP1 is in Beta and the SP1 Update is under development. XNA Game Studio Express relies heavily on Visual C# Express and will need both of these updates in order to have full functionality on Windows Vista. For more information on using the Visual Studio 2005 products with Windows Vista, including known issues and possible workarounds, please visit the Visual Studio on Windows Vista support page.

We appreciate your patience while waiting for the release of the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista. I think it's important to let you know that as Windows Vista gets closer to consumer release, the XNA Game Studio Express team will be actively testing to see how XNA Game Studio Express works and if there are any issues that would prevent it from working as expected. Through this blog, we'll let you know about any issues and how to workaround them. You may even end up at a presentation on XNA Game Studio Express and see us demoing on Windows Vista--all to make sure that XNA Game Studio Express works perfectly on the next version of Windows.