Michael Klucher’s Blog

What's New With XNA Game Studio Device Management?

Saturday, September 20 2008 - xna-game-studio-device-management

In XNA Game Studio 2.0 I think we ended up making some good changes to device management. I consider "device management" to be everything from adding your Xbox 360 on your computer to XNA Game Studio Connect on the console. Hopefully you've noticed some of them but here were some of the new features.

XNA Game Studio Device Center

• Created an entirely new program just for managing devices outside of Visual Studio.
  
  
• Created an easy to follow wizard for adding your Xbox 360, this included easier instructions to follow as well as a better entry field for the Connection Key.
  
  
• Added a toolbar in Visual Studio which allows you to dynamically select an Xbox 360 to target or add a new device without leaving Visual Studio.

XNA Game Studio Connect

• Simplified the experience, there's only one screen in which to act on. You can display, or reset connection keys all from the same screen.
  
  
• Allow you to connect to XNA Game Studio connect with multiple computers (You could only use one computer previously without destroying the other keys).
  
  
• Games are stored in the Games Library just like your other games. You can see this post for more information.

Most of this was based on feedback we had gotten from users, and experiences we knew we wanted to improve from 1.0/1.0 Refresh but didn't really have the time. The overwhelming feedback that we had seen was that the connection key process was confusing. Especially so when you had to go to a settings menu to enter it, then go to another screen to actually test it. We also got feedback that people had more than one PC that they wanted to use with the XNA Game Launcher such as a desktop and a laptop, which lead us to adding the feature to allow multiple PC's to use XNA Game Studio Connect.

While there were other huge features like networking and Visual Studio support we really tried to improve the experience for those of you developing games on the Xbox 360. Many of the new things you might have already picked up just using the product, I wanted to go over this because next up I'll post about what the future holds for XNA Game Studio Device Management and what you'd like to see next, so be thinking about it!