Building Game Explorer Support Into Your XNA Project

Check out this post on Chris Charabaruk’s blog.

One of the great new features in Microsoft® Windows® Vista is the Game Explorer. The Game Explorer (or GameUX, as taken from the C++ header file for the component) makes it easy for Vista users to quickly and easily find the game they want to play or administer. Unfortunately, when Microsoft released XNA Game Studio™ Express, support to add XNA projects to Game Explorer was not added. In this article, I will demonstrate how to add support for Game Explorer into your XNA project.

For this article you will require the following software: XNA Game Studioâ„¢ Express, the Windows SDK, and the DirectX SDK. If you do not have Visual C++â„¢ Express or better installed, make sure to install the C++ compiler as part of Windows SDK.

There are some caveats with using this method of integration, but until such a time as Microsoft adds Game Explorer support to XNA Game Studioâ„¢ Express, this is the only reasonable way to add the integration. See the section called “Problems and Caveats” for details…

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