13 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

Microsoft has not announced that XNA is discontinued, ergo XNA is not dead. End of.

Microsoft has barely ever announced that they would discontinue a technology. They usually let it die progressively by not making any more updates, not providing support, no more activity from MSFT employees on dedicated forums...etc.

So XNA is not dead of course, as It can still be used for Windows desktop, WP7 and XBOX360 platforms, which is already pretty nice, but it is definitely a technology of the past for Microsoft. For the open source community, as you mentioned, there is another story with MonoGame, though at some point, they will have to introduce some new features that were not accessible from XNA (Geometry shaders, tessellation, compute shaders...etc.), and they will have to add new APIs that won't be anymore a XNA thing, It will be a MonoGame thing.

If you think that there is a XNA team working underground, well, there isn't. Not a single job career on Microsoft jobs on the past year has been published about such an underground project (this kind of thing are usually easily spotable).

If you search for a XNA developer from the XNA team responding to technical question at the "Xbox LIVE Indie Games Forums" you won't find any of them for the past 12 months.

But now, if you ask for DirectX and C++ for Windows 8 Metro or Windows Phone 8, you will find several people from Microsoft working on it and helping on official Microsoft forums.

It has been pretty clear from last year Build Conference, that the current focus for Microsoft is going back to native C++ and raw DirectX. XNA is absolutely no more developed at MSFT.

The errors you are posting are quite normal, as I didn't remove lots of API that are compiled for the desktop (but are not used my metro app. For example, the namespace Design that is generating lots of errors and is only used on desktop but can be removed easily). Keep in mind that the SharpDX 2.0 assemblies for Win8/Metro are a preview... SharpDX will probably pass certifications as all the API is using authorized COM/Win32 API. Though there are couple of things that still need to be clarified about the new 4.5 core assemblies...

The preview version is probably not entirely cleanup up from some CLR/Win32 functions that are not supported by Win8 metro, but that will be easy to replace them.

Using SharpDX, you will be able to use it from desktop as well on Metro, without to change your code.

You should better leverage on the unique features of your wrapper instead of bashing around existing wrappers. We are all on the same boat.