Beginning creating Windows 8 Metro apps with C# and XAML

Question

I'm looking to develop a game for Windows 8 using C# and XAML, simply because I have a small amount of experience with C# and XNA 4.0 (Am I right in thinking I need to move on from XNA for win8?).

With it being such a fresh topic, a quick search on Amazon for a book to learn to create such apps only yielded a very small number of results... most of which have no reviews yet. I was just wondering if anyone can recommend a book for a (sort of) newbie, probably based on the quality of previous titles by the author?

Alternatively, any good web resources? (I'm a student so don't have much money after all!)

Apologies for asking such an open-ended question... I'm just struggling to find where to begin.

Solution 1

Charles Petzold has written a new version of Programming Windows, which in previous versions was (and still is!) the reference for coding against Win32.

The 6th edition:

[focuses] on writing Metro style applications for Windows 8

It's available from O'Reilly at a discounted price of $20 at the moment and seems pretty good from what I've read of it so far! It'll go up in price progressively (as detailed on the O'Reilly website) between now and November to $50, so worth grabbing now if you can - particularly as you mention you're a student and thus lacking funds =)

Solution 2

Other answers covered non-game Metro style apps relatively well, and I'll not repeat them.

On the topic of XNA:

XNA is presumed dead until further notice, as it does not support the latest version of DirectX they are pushing for Metro apps. That doesn't mean you can't still write games in XNA, but the users would have to run them in Desktop, rather than in Metro. (bummer)

But...

All is not lost. There is a pretty nice Managed DirectX API for .NET called SharpDX. Even better (once it's fully baked) is the ANX Framework, which seeks to be a complete open-source replacement for XNA. I don't think they are done yet, but their goal is to let you translate an XNA title by just swapping namespaces.

sidebar: ANX is using SharpDX underneath the covers.

Solution 3

MonoGame is an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework that now supports Windows 8. Using MonoGame you can build an XNA game as a Metro Style App and with a few extra steps get your game into the Windows 8 Store.

http://monogame.codeplex.com/

I have been working with it for a few weeks now and have 2 simple games working that are direct ports of Windows Phone apps.

Also if you have Windows 8 installed, go to the store and check out ARMED! by Sickhead games. That is a MonoGame app.

I have been working with Sickhead's fork of the MonoGame source from Git. Great place to start. https://github.com/SickheadGames/MonoGame

-bob