Source Control and "community"

Robin Debreuil

I have a current non xna project on codeplex, which is a great resource for sharing code and 'community' building. This seems to be one of the goals of xna in the non pro versions, and these fourms show is working. But! One of the things we are really missing to get fully there is source control. It becomes much harder for groups of dispersed people to work together on a project without it.

I understand the logic of having 'pro' features in the 'pro' tool, however I think there really needs to be some access to source control for community type things. No probelm if there was a non-commercial limitation, or even codeplex access only (and maybe give a similar deal to non-MS people hosting free xna code projects). Or something...

As an example, it would be great to have projects that evolved game harnesses - shell xna projects for 2d, 3d, and the various genres of games. Interested people could tweak things, add components etc. So it would be great to have a project like that somewhere like codeplex. However it would be essentially downloading zips and patching, or maybe stiching things together in VS2005 in the current version of C# express (unless I'm missing something). So some form of limited source control that allowed this kind of thing would be most welcome.

I know Christmas is over, but maybe next version

Derek Nedelman

My take on the "community" aspect of XNA was creating an easy to use development platform that would allow people to create games that others could download and play. Not that there's anything wrong with people coming together and working on something collaboratively, but what you suggest seems beyond the scope of what the XNA team set out to do, and I certainly don't think it needs to be integrated into the platform for a community to be successful since, as you've noted, there are already resources available for those who want to manage their group developments.

Personally I'd like to see the XNA team work on adding more features to the development tools by opening up more Xbox-specific features, fixing bugs, and in general addressing our core development needs.

Glenn Wilson

Remember that if you do have suggestions, or know of some bugs in the system that you should also post them on the http://connect.microsoft.om site so that the teams can track them.

I do feel that it is a good idea to pout a post here as it gives the community a point to discuss the option, but we do need to post th suggestions in the official way. One suggestion would be to log the initial suggestion or bug and then link it to a post here making sure that in both posts you have a link to the other so that it can be tracked.

Jim Perry

Derek Nedelman wrote:

Personally I'd like to see the XNA team work on adding more features to the development tools by opening up more Xbox-specific features, fixing bugs, and in general addressing our core development needs.

Ditto. Source control isn't MS's job, it's ours. There's enough source control tools out there for teams to use. The entire community can't be a team, it would get out of hand rapidly.

Robin Debreuil

Good point, I will do that for sure..

Robin Debreuil

Well I'm not suggesting they create anything, just allow it, or even allow it a bit...