Does XNA effectively replace Managed Directx?

Question

The subject speaks for itself.

Does XNA effectively replace Managed DirectX?

We have a few projects using managed DirectX in VB.NET. I was considering porting one over to XNA, but wonder whether it's worth the effort.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Answer 1

Does XNA effectively replace Managed DirectX? According to the wikipedia entry for MDX it does. At least for game development purposes.

XNA aims to be a framework for making games, so it is easy to get started. Managed DirectX is "just" a managed wrapper over the APIs, so you have more freedom but probably have to do more framework style code yourself.

Also, now there's the API Code Pack, which provides managed wrappers around the latest DirectX APIs. To me that sounds like an updated version of what Managed DirectX used to be.

Answer 2

It's not exactly the same. One thing you should consider is that Managed DirectX will no longer be developed. So if you change to XNA, you support for DirectX 9, but not DirectX 10 (or 11 soon). So if you really want to replace Managed DirectX, you should have a look at SlimDX. It's not (yet) as large as MDX, but this will change and everything should be supported. The best thing is, it supports also DirectX 10. I used it myself and I guess it's work a look.