NEW, I MEAN REALLY NEW TO XNA...WHAT'S NEXT?

I sat in on Chris Bowen's XNA Gaming Presentation a couple weeks ago. I have a good foundation in Visual Basic.NET and some programming in Pascal. I have two tasks to perform; 1. learn C# and 2. get my feet wet with XNA.

What does your membership suggest as a quick re-education program?

Chris made mention of some video tutorials. Would you suggest any books that were helpful to you?

(I would really to be able to attend my first XNA developers group meeting understanding a little of the code and the terminology).

After all, its not easy being Green!

 For starters I wouldn't worry too much about learning C#.  The biggest differences between VB.NET and C# at the beginner level boil down to syntax differences and the IDE generally identifies those for you so you don't have to worry too much.  If you're still hesitant though, check out http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/ and watch a few of the C# videos that are freely available.

Thus far I have found that the books don't really help all that much.  Probably becasue most of them focus so heavily on doing 3D stuff.  Yeah it is cool and all, but all I really want to do is create graphically simple 2D games that focus on good gameplay.  Probably the best thing to do starting out is to watch the video tutorials at http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted since they go into some really good details on how most things work.  After you've watched those, take a dive into the RPG starter kit since that is what we are going to be covering in the meetings going forward. 

My son who lives and works four hours away is really into XBox. Do the games only work on that medium or will they run on the PC as well? Seems like Chris B was playing his creation on a PC.

Thanks for your help and suggestions, I will followup with them!

 XNA based games can be played on any of three platforms.  Xbox 360, PC, and Zune.  Best of luck with your learning and hopefully you'll make it to next month's meeting.

 When/where are the meetings posted? I have not heard of any meetings...are they by invite only?

The group meets monthly in the Microsoft Regional Offices on 201 Jones Road in Waltham, MA on the fourth (4th) Wednesday of every month. This means that the next meeting is scheduled for August 27th @ 6:00pm.

Michael