Well finally, Microsoft has done something to bring game development to the .Net community:
XNA Game Studio Express. This product is still in Beta, but a first look at it seems very promising. One thing to notice is that it works only with
Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition (and not with the full suites of Visual Studio 2005). The XNA Game Library is a managed code wrapper over the DirectX library with everything you need to create a fast (or slow) 2D or 3D arcade game. The package comes with a build-in game demo which demonstrates most aspects of a 2D game. Compiling of this demo went well for me (but I saw some complains from others on Microsoft's
forum). Still, making the demo work with the keyboard required some
tweaking of the code, since by default, the game responds to a Xbox 360 controller. The reason is that the XNA Game Studio can produce games that can run on both PC and Xbox 360. One concern I have after compiling the demo is the memory usage of the game (about 165Mb). I haven't had the time to check this issue more, but surely this can be fixed. Nevertheless, the XNA Game Studio Express is well worth a look if you are looking for a free solution to do some game development.