Continuous MonoGame, NuGet Love, Updated Samples and more

MonoGame, the game development framework that keeps on giving and a C4F favorite, continues rolling along, with another update and a drive to provide much more frequent releases.

Simon Jackson (Dark Gensis) shares all the news and highlights.

Automation and continuous delivery with MonoGame

For a long time MonoGame had only spurious updates and not a lot of outward activity (as opposed to the frantic and sometimes chaotic internal goings on in the mass of community contributions), this garnered such comments as “Is MonoGame dead?”.

The team started a trend just over a year ago by releasing development NuGet packages and publishing the development builds on the main MonoGame.Net website.  Still however, there was a drive in the team to do more and make their efforts more public.

Fast forward to today and not only have the team released 2 major updates in as many months but they have also implemented an automated NuGet delivery solution.

Continuous delivery

Thanks to a lot of hard work in the background the team have implemented continuous NuGet delivery in two phases:

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MonoGame goes fully Universal

The obvious main contender that caused two releases in the recent months was the addition of the new Universal Windows Project (UWP / UAP), launched just in time for all the big announcements at the Microsoft Build conference this year. This opens the door to full Windows 10 development and all the platforms it currently supports:

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Grabbing your releases

Starting with NuGet is fast and easy, just download the installer from the MonoGame.Net downloads page for your platform of choice:

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Getting ahead of the curve

If you are the adventurous sort you can get your releases even faster (especially if a much needed fix has just been pushed to the repository). You have two options, you can either grab the development release installers (updated with each successful build):

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Samples a plenty

As ever, the MonoGame project Samples have been updated with the latest releases (Plus a minor clean up fix to tidy up the removal of the old NuGet packages)

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And Yet there is More!

MonoGame is really getting some love of late, especially on NuGet.  While checking and testing out the automated NuGet packages, I came across several new packages created specifically to support MonoGame games, here;s just a snippet of what I’ve found:

... [Head over to the post for all the details]

MonoGame 3.4

This is the official MonoGame 3.4 release. This release comes in less than a month and a half since the last release, but it still has 300 commits from 16 contributors full of fixes and new features!

• MonoGame 3.4 for VisualStudio
• MonoGame 3.4 for MacOS
• MonoGame 3.4 Pipeline GUI Tool for MacOS stand alone installer
• MonoGame 3.4 for Linux
• MonoGame 3.4 Source Code On GitHub
• MonoGame 3.4 Assemblies on NuGet

This is a particularly special release as it includes the first support for Windows 10 Universal Apps and was timed to coordinate with the Build 2015 conference going on right now! With the new Windows UAP platform support you will be able to build a single game package that will work on Windows desktops, tablets, phones, Xbox One, and even Raspberry Pi. Note to use this release you need to install the latest Windows 10 SDK which will be released later today.

Also work is still ongoing for the Linux installer. You should either work with the zipped binaries above or building from source code when developing from Linux.

This is a short summary of the major changes in this release:

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Here are just a few of our MonoGame posts;

• MonoGame says goodbye to XNA (and that's a great thing)
• MonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere
• XNA and a Windows 8 Store game? MonoGame!
• Windows Store 8 Game, MonoGame, SignalR and more
• MonoGame for Windows 8 tutorial and ton's of new samples too
• MonoGame, F# and Santa!

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