The XNA Framework

You may or may not have heard of the .NET Framework. XNA has evolved from this, so if I explain a little, things should become clearer. .NET is essentially a (quite large) library of programming code that developers can use and build on to create their own web applications or desktop applications. This library is designed to be powerful but very easy to use so that developers can rapidly create applications.

What’s slightly different or unusual about .NET is the way it turns programs you write into applications end users can run. Traditionally, you would write your program and you would use another program to convert your program into code that the computer can understand. This process is called compilation and the program that does it is called the compiler.

With .NET, the program you write is not compiled directly into code the computer can run. It’s compiled into something called the Common Intermediate Language (CIL). This CIL code can then be converted fairly easily into code that can be run on any platform that the .NET framework is released for. Examples of such platforms are Smartphones, Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and every version of Windows since Windows 98. As Smartphones and Windows Mobile devices have limited memory, Microsoft released a cut-down version of the .NET Framework library called the .NET Compact Framework.

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