On Thursday morning at GDC, Chase Boyd, who works in the Windows Graphics Division at Microsoft, presented a speech titled “Creating a Great Metro Style Game,” where he divulged details about this new process. Throughout the talk, XNA was nowhere to be found, but I questioned him about transferring a current XNA project over to Metro, and he assured me that Microsoft “is currently working on the white paper to streamline that process,” and that the updates in Visual Studio 2011 will further simplify that process.

“When we implemented this new sample framework and set up the samples, we modeled it as close as we could with XNA. In fact, with a lot of the new syntax improvements which have been incorporated in Visual Studio [2011], the code can be pretty easily pasted over. We’ve also structured those example code bases to work the way an XNA person would expect the way they would want.” While they haven’t published any papers yet detailing precisely how to port a game over, he assured me that it is currently in the works.

One concept new to many developers coming from XNA, however, is the fact that “Windows 8 is a touch-first device,” meaning that it is largely geared toward inputs from a user’s fingers, as opposed to an external piece of hardware such as a controller. Fortunately, the APIs for a number of joysticks and controllers are included, so there is no need to fret just yet.

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