Nick Gravelyn

Lots of people are on the XNA GS 3.0 wagon (and really, why wouldn’t you be?) so a lot of people are starting to ask about XNA GS 3.0/XNA FX 3.0 and which version of .NET it requires. Is it 2.0? 3.5? 3.0?

The content pipeline in XNA Game Studio 3.0 takes advantage of .NET 3.5. For this reason all content pipeline extension projects must be made to target .NET 3.5. However, this isn’t a big deal since it’s a build time aspect only and, being that you have Visual Studio 2008 installed, you already have .NET 3.5.

The entire run-time portion of the XNA FX 3.0 is made to target .NET 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5 at your choice. It will default to targeting 3.5, but you can change this in one of two ways:

1. When creating the project, there is a drop-down menu above the project templates. From there you can select any of those three .NET framework versions to target. This option only exists for non-Express versions of Visual Studio 2008. For Express, just create your project and use the instructions in #2:
2. If your project is already created, right click on the project and select Properties. On the Applications tab you will notice an option titled Target Framework. Simply choose the version you desire and then save. It will likely have to close and re-open your solution for this to take effect.

So don’t worry that your users have to have .NET 3.5 (unless, of course, you are utilizing it in your game). You can easily drop your game to using .NET 2.0 and everything will keep on working just fine.