XNA in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013
A few weeks ago, I got a couple of emails from two different people, both of them pointing me in the direction of some steps that would get XNA installed in Visual Studio 2012 or 2013. I should mention that in the past, I’ve followed directions like this without success. I had one time where I spent about 10 hours total mucking around with configuration files and never had anything happen, and another time where I got the XNA extension loaded, but the content project just didn’t work at all. So I’ve just been staying with Visual Studio 2010 for XNA development (while using 2012 and now 2013 for other development).
But these directions actually worked, and I was able to get XNA running in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013!
Now I should tell you that these instructions were not exactly straightforward. Now that I see what actually works, I’m not surprised I failed to make it work in previous attempts. (It was probably especially complicated for me, because I had multiple versions of Visual Studio installed simultaneously.)
So to make the process easier for others, I’ve put together a little PowerShell script that does things for you. You need Visual Studio 2010 or Visual C# Express 2010 installed, and XNA Game Studio 2010 installed on top of that, plus whatever newer version you want (maybe Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop?) you simply run the script, wait a few minutes, and you’ve got XNA in VS 2013! If you’ve got multiple versions of Visual Studio installed, the script will install it for all of them.
I wrote a tutorial about it here: http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/xna-after-visual-studio-2010
The script itself can be found on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/rbwhitaker/xna-beyond-vs-2010/downloads
If you have any meaningful changes that you want to add, feel free to fork the project, make the changes, then send me a pull request (or just send me an email).
I know this isn’t exactly 100XP related. But it is definitely related to my series on the Battle for XNA.