BACK A FEW YEARS AGO I HAD AN IDEA. What if I could make the power of the DirectX API available to the developers who were going to be using the new set of languages and common language runtime that Microsoft was developing? The idea was intriguing, and opening up a larger portion of the world to DirectX was a goal I was only happy to endorse. - Besides, what developer doesn't want to write games? It seems that at least once a week I am answering questions directly regard- ing the performance of managed code, and Managed DirectX in particular. One of the more common questions I hear is some...

It's hard to believe the runaway popularity XNA has achieved in the short period of time since it was released in late 2006. At that time, I got together with a couple friends to check out (with some trepidation, I must confess) whether games really could be written in managed code. We were very excited, and everyone wanted to know if you could get the same benefits you obtain from writing games using managed code as you do when creating standard Windows programs. We knew people in the game programming community were worried about managed code's execution speed, and many people simply didn't...