XNA is awesome! It is truly a shame that Microsoft decided to stop supporting it. After many failed attempts throughout the years at getting started with game programming, it looks like I finally found something will allow me to finish a 2D and possibly a 3D game.
To be clear, all my "XNA" learning so far has been with Monogame, which is open-sourced XNA. In the short time that I spent, I now know how to display textures and even do basic animations. At this point I feel confident enough to make pong.
The stuff I liked so far is that there are plenty of resources to learn XNA/Monogame i.e. books, online tutorials, youtube lessons. Since XNA is now "dead" some XNA books on Amazon.com can be had for really cheap. I was able to snag "Learning XNA 4.0" for $16! More than 95% of what I've read from the book applies directly to Monogame.
There are only very few things I don't like about XNA/Monogame. Everything that a game in XNA uses and it's not code is referred to as content i.e. images, sounds, etc. The tool that compiles the content into a format that XNA/Monogame can use, has not been ported to Monogame as of this writing. This forces you to use XNA Studio or the Windows Phone SDK. Also, the Visual Studio templates for Monogame have some weird bugs that still need to be ironed out. However, given that I'm only a beginner some of these issues might no be issues at
all, and I'll probably run into more major things the more I use the
framework.
Overall, my initial reaction from XNA and Monogame have been very positive. The multiplatform version of Bastion, Terraria, Fez use Monogame. If you go by those examples, it is clear the framework has a bright future since it can only get better.
Would I recommend others to learn XNA/Monogame? Absolutely!
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