Ex NA

Things you might not know about me. I’m fluent in Algol 68. I know the George III Operating System (and its amazing editor) really well. If you ever need a VMS System Manager, I’m your man. I can write Modular II and Coral 66 programs, use Forth and Turbo Pascal with aplomb and and perform low level programming of the 6522 PIA (Programmable Interface Adapter chip) in 6502 machine code, should you ever need someone to do that.

Of course these skills are pretty much useless these days, as the above technologies are well past their sell by date. The good news, for me at least, is that all of these skills translate into useful ones using today’s technology. I know about operating systems, programming languages and low level interfacing. And although the relentless march of change has forced me to pick up new skills over the years, I’ve never lost sight of the fact that working with computers is just taking a machine that can do stuff and making it useful.

Today Microsoft formally started to pull the shutters on XNA. I was there at the start and I’ve followed the technology ever since. I’ve loved making games with it, and loved what other people have made with it. When Version 4.0 came out I remember thinking that they had put so much into it that the only way was down. My big concern was that they would keep on adding things until it became too complex and cumbersome to be useful.

XNA has done great things for programming and we’ve used it to good effect at Hull for many years. In reality it is not going away, it will still be possible to make XNA programs and distribute them, and the folks at MonoGame will take the XNA torch and carry it on to great things. However XNA will no longer have the seal of Microsoft support. It’s sad that Microsoft have moved on, but I think it was kind of inevitable. From a business point of view I never really understood how it could make a profit for the company, and in these tough times that probably spelt the end for the technology as a Microsoft product.

However, I don’t think that anyone who has built up a skill set in XNA has wasted their time. All games work in fundamentally the same way and all game developers need to address the same problems irrespective of the platform they are using. You just need to take a leaf out of my book (which I’ve had a while) and move the things you have learnt into a shiny new context. Take a look at Unity for some very interesting new directions. And find out more about MonoGame, which I think is wonderful.

Comments

[BrianT]

I suspect we must be a similar age since we seem to have similar earlier experiences, although I remember some of the names differently.

The first computer program I wrote was something to calculate the Fibonacci sequence in Algol 60 (I suppose 68 may be a later version) on an Eliot 803 (or was it 503?) when I was 16.

At then end of the year Sunderland Poly scrapped the computer and we no longer had one afternoon off from school to go and play. I asked my teacher if there was any chance I could have the computer (although since it filled a large room and was less powerful than the HP 11c calculator I bought in 1982 I think it was probably impractical).

The head of maths tactfully suggested that my parents probably couldn't afford the electricity bill since the Poly also couldn't. I reflected on the fact that the on/off switch was actually a large lever on the wall with a large sign in red letters saying "Danger! 600V" and reluctantly decided he was right.

Then in the mid 80's when I bought an Amstrad 8256 (deliberately not PC compatible because I recognised what would be a class A drug for me when I saw one) to do my company accounts (as a freelance software engineer) I weakened and bought a Modula 2 (not Modular II) compiler and promptly wasted several weekends writing a balanced binary tree generator in the wonderful language.

I don't suppose you also remember the first self-styled computer pornography (AFAIK)? An article I first saw in about 1982 entitled "Real Programmers don't use Pascal" with classic lines like -

"'What you see is what you get is as bad in text editors as it is in women. What you want is Teco. Fast, powerful, cryptic and dangerous."

A few years later I found an excuse to write some Teco ( probably only one cryptic line was required) and get paid for it when we needed to convert some documentation written in Wordstar on the PC to normal text on a VAX. I find that in the 21st century lambda expressions can provide the same kind of fulfillment.

[A Gurha]

Microsoft isnt relevant anymore when it comes to consumer world. They might live for eternity in Enterprise world but i would personally shy away doing any microsoft stuff in future which involves regular consumers you see in a mall or supermarket. Its not a secret Apple & Google created the best gaming device's ever ( IPhone and Android Phones ). Amount of people playing PC games or Consoles is shrinking rapidly and in 5-10 years as smartphones are almost as powerful as a PC i would love to see how many people still buy consoles and PC games. All XNA / .NET / WINRT is all good and relevant if you still want to go and write another bog standard enterprise app at a bank but if you want to do stuff what consumers want students should learn iOS / Android. Most certainly agree on your point above that its all building programming skills but is there much benefit in using technologies / frameworks which arent relevant as much as others ?. I wrote .NET / C# / F# for almost 8 years , started learning iOS / MAC development 2 years back and now do mostly NodeJS / Javascript / iOS / Unix kind of stuff as thats what is relevant if you want to work on cool and exciting stuff.

[Rob]

Some very good comments. I think that Microsoft has decided it is going to be in the personal consumer space and it will get there, because it has the funds and the determination to do it. The only thing stopping Microsoft from rivalling Android and iOS would be if they decided they didn't want to be there after all.

Life is all about pendulums and cycles. There are people out there with an interest in seeing the fortunes of these companies rise and fall, and at the moment the pendulum is starting to swing away from Apple and towards something else, which might be Microsoft in the longer term. You never know....

[Jules]

Microsoft has lot the plot in depreciating the .NET runtime (Silverlight and XNA) were great technologies for producing LOB and Indie games.

Promoting Javascript, just to get the Webby guys on board, is throwing away 30 years of robust Compilation, Type safe, Object orientated programming. Javascript simply not up to the mark for LOB Applications.

MonoGame are a great set iof guys, just when Microsoft dumped us Indie Game Developers in it. The Great part of MonoGame is that it can be ported to iOS and Android, and Playstation etc. So along with the the Xmarine guys we can still use Visual Studio, write robust C# code and port onto Android and iOS.

I agree Microsoft deserve to be left behind now.