It's quite nifty, having fiddled with it for a few minutes. A default XNA project in C# provides you with base code and gives you a main loop. It seems really easy to get things moving about on screen. It seems to do what libraries like SDL and Allegro do, hiding the bits of Windows you don't need.
They've left out an important chunk though - the content pipeline is missing! Hopefully it will be ready soon and you can use the standard binary loaders until then, but the content pipeline sounds really useful.
The Spacewar project example is a bit, er, dodgy. The 1280x720 screen resolution is hard coded in various places, including being buried in the game logic, and keyboard support is just broken (you can un#define it, but the keyboard controls both ships at once). They recommend a DX9 PS2.0 graphics card, but my DX8.1 PS1.4 Radeon9000M runs it fine if you switch off multisampling in code.
They've left out an important chunk though - the content pipeline is missing! Hopefully it will be ready soon and you can use the standard binary loaders until then, but the content pipeline sounds really useful.
The Spacewar project example is a bit, er, dodgy. The 1280x720 screen resolution is hard coded in various places, including being buried in the game logic, and keyboard support is just broken (you can un#define it, but the keyboard controls both ships at once). They recommend a DX9 PS2.0 graphics card, but my DX8.1 PS1.4 Radeon9000M runs it fine if you switch off multisampling in code.