XBox and XNA

I bought an XBox this weekend and built a project in XNA. XNA is Microsoft's game development system for both Windows and XBox. Since it's easier to build on the Windows box I spent most of my time writing the application there, with full access to the .NET stack. I then went to move it over to the XBox to find that the XBox only supports a very small subset of the .NET stack, excluding, most particularly any direct access to networking. This is probably a security measure to avoid viruses on the box. While that is appreciated, it severely limits what legitimate application developers can do.

Don't get me wrong, you can do game-style networking. Very easily, in fact. In fact, I found the whole application building process quite pleasant. Which is remarkable given that I have no previous experience in gaming style graphics APIs, which are vastly different from enterprise UI APIs.

What I find annoying about this, and almost all of device development is how strictly licensed it is. I was looking around for some help with the networking API and found a person who had written a text chat example for XNA. Only to have someone post in the comments that the application violated the EULA for the box. Ugh.

Why is it that I can write any application I want for your desktop or laptop, but when it comes to writing for your video game console or cell phone it's restrictive beyond belief. I still haven't gotten my iPhone development key from Apple, which means that I can write iPhone apps, but I can't actually put them on the phone.

I think that's why I find the Open Screen initiative so appealing. One UI toolkit, available across all the platforms. Hopefully there will be enough popular outcry to get it out there.

For the time being I think I'm going to port my daughter's 'stamper' game to the XBox. It's a kids paint program that I wrote in Flex. She can take characters and place them on the screen, then move them around, type in text blocks, draw with crayons and so on. Well, first I'll check the marketplace to make sure someone hasn't done it already. Then I'll do it.