Although XNA isn’t explored within my studies at university I took an interest in it for a couple of reasons. Firstly a Lecturer suggested that learning new new languages would help us to better understand the underlying concepts of programming and help us to approach challenges in a more structured way, after looking at a couple of other languages, I settled on exploring the XNA.
What were my alternatives
The other main alternatives has been Python and BOO. I considered Python because we had been given a brief introduction Pygame at the start of first year, but after working my way through a couple of tutorials I quickly became frustrated at the issues with white-space in relation to indenting. I also considered Boo as it is one of the languages supported by Unity for scripting, but also a part of me just likes slightly less well known stuff. I’m still interested in looking at Boo closer, although it has the same white-space issues as Python and isn’t exactly a common occurrence in requirements within the games industry, I do think that attempting a simple game engine using Boo and openTK could be interesting. I especially feel that with a language like Boo there are fewer resources available in the way of tutorials etc, and so will require a better fundamental understanding of programming concepts and so will better test my abilities than a more common language such as Python.
So why XNA
I chose XNA as it offers a simple way for displaying graphics and so can be used to quickly test game logic for new projects without having to bother with spending time on rendering through OpenGLor directX. Obviously this is also possible with other languages such as Java, but XNA is specifically developed for games and has a wealth of online resources available, whereas a lot of the resources available for other languages is more generic and so takes a while to twist into what it is you actually need. Also I own an Xbox360, and so it seemed natural that as a programmer with a strong interest in programming for games I would want to create content for a platform I already used and was comfortable with. The final advantage I’ve found with XNA is more an advantage of C#, and that is that I started examining it at about the same time as we were being expected to pick up Java with minimal aid from lecturers and the similarities between the two helped me with my understanding of the concepts. For instance with C++ as my first language when we were introduced to Interfaces in Java I was sceptical of their use, and it was actually in C# that I first saw a need for them.