XNA Support Coming to Visual Basic

Visual Basic developers can start holding their breath for the moment they can start building their first XNA game without writing a single line of C#.

Lisa Feigenbaum, a Community Program Manager for the Visual Studio Professional team offered the good news at the end of the past week.

“Senior Director Dave Mendlen announced that XNA support will be coming to Visual Basic,” she said.

“This is part of Microsoft’s co-evolution strategy, whereby we are providing equal access to Microsoft technologies for both C# and Visual Basic developers. XNA has been a top Visual Basic customer request for the past several years, so we are excited to bring this support to the product.”

At this point in time, devs that want to start creating games by leveraging XNA need to do it with C#.

This of course poses a problem to those developers that are handier when it comes down to Visual Basic. Many of them prefer VB to C# to the point at which they preferred to brush XNA aside altogether than code in anything else but Visual Basic.

But no longer. Later this year, Microsoft will make XAN and VB play nice together. The Redmond company hasn’t provided any specific details as of yet, not offered any estimate when it might do so.

Feigenbaum only advised devs to “stay tuned for the next couple of months when we will provide additional details on these plans.”

I’m willing to bet that developers will much rather prefer that the software giant introduces XNA support to Visual Basic sooner than later, and that it does this for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.

It would also be nice of Microsoft to also allow VS2008 devs a chance to leverage XNA.

But in the end, fact is that the company lingered long enough to make this move and that devs shouldn’t have to wait even more for Visual Studio vNext and .NEXt Framework vNext.