This week at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) Microsoft announced XNA Studio, a full toolset for game development built around Visual Studio and the XNA platform (announced at last year's GDC). The product suite promises to provide not only programming tools, but workflow and asset and build management tools as well. Anyone who has worked on a modern game development project will immediately realise how useful such an environement would be. Unlike most corporate development projects, game dev projects involve a huge number of non-code assets that are a pain to manage, as well as many different builds to cater for different platforms and configurations (and you thought keeping your debug and reatail builds in synch was tough ;-) ).
With game development becoming increasingly complex, middleware and prebuilt tools are fast becoming the preferred way to develop. With XNA's aim to become a common development platform for multimedia development on PC, Xbox and even Windows mobile platforms, MS is obviously looking to cash in on that trend.
For more info on XNA and XNA studio (and I mean just a tiny bit more, there's not really a heck of a lot of info available) visit the XNA website.
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