Mono.XNA - the good, the bad and the ugly

There's been a good few changes for Mono.XNA recently. Firstly, we've moved to google project hosting. The idea of having an integrated issue tracker, integrated wiki, integrated email alerts was just to tempting to resist. Also we now have the ability to give write access to anyone we want as opposed to having to go through novell to grant users write access to the mono SVN which can take time.

So, the new URL for the SVN/Wiki/Issue Tracker etc is here: http://code.google.com/p/monoxna/

Feel free to drop in and start coding.

As part of the move, we've now toughened up on the contributing guidelines. Code must have tests, must follow the coding guidelines etc. Links to the relevant documentation about contributing can be seen on our google mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/monoxna

Also, a little on my own work on XNA. I "reverse engineered" the .XNB format about 2-3 weeks ago. The only implementation so far is the Texture2DReader implementation i coded together. It's probably the most basic .XNB type in XNA, so it should serve as a good example as to how to code future files together. Unfortunately even the Texture2D format took quite a while to figure out. For anyone trying to hack some code together to decode other types, it isn't easy. You will spend hours with a hex editor.... well, it's quite possible you're better at it than me, but it took me hours :p

Still, that's another step forward. Things are looking bright for XNA, all we need now is a dozen coders to start hacking and planning and coding their way through the classes and then we can really start getting stuff done!