How to install XNA game studio on Visual Studio 2012?
XnaVisual Studio-2012Xna Problem Overview
Is it possible to create XNA games using Visual Studio 2012?
Xna Solutions
Solution 1 - Xna
Yes, it's possible with a bit of tweak. Unfortunately, you still have to have VS 2010 installed.
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First, install XNA Game Studio 4.0. The easiest way is to install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 which contains everything required.
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Copy the XNA Game Extension from VS 10 to VS 11 by opening a command prompt 'as administrator' and executing the following (may vary if not x64 computer with defaults paths) :
xcopy /e "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\XNA Game Studio 4.0" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\XNA Game Studio 4.0"
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Run notepad as administrator then open
extension.vsixmanifest
in the destination directory just created. -
Upgrade the Supported product version to match the new version (or duplicate the whole
VisualStudio
element and change theVersion
attribute, as @brainslugs83 said in comments):<SupportedProducts> <VisualStudio Version="11.0"> <Edition>VSTS</Edition> <Edition>VSTD</Edition> <Edition>Pro</Edition> <Edition>VCSExpress</Edition> <Edition>VPDExpress</Edition> </VisualStudio> </SupportedProducts>
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Don't forget to clear/delete your cache in %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Extensions.
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You may have to run the command to tells Visual Studio that new extensions are available. If you see an 'access denied' message, try launching the console as an administrator.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /setup
This has been tested for Windows Games, but not WP7 or Xbox games.
[Edit] According Jowsty, this works also for XBox 360 Games.
[Edit for Visual Studio 2013 & Windows 8.1] See here for documentation on installing Windows Phone SDK 7.1 on Windows 8.1. Use VS version number 12.0 in place of 11.0 for all of these steps, and they will still work correctly.
Solution 2 - Xna
On codeplex was released new XNA Extension for Visual Studio 2012/2013. You can download it from: https://msxna.codeplex.com/releases
Solution 3 - Xna
I found another issue, for some reason if the extensions are cached in the local AppData folder, the XNA extensions never get loaded.
You need to remove the files extensionSdks.en-US.cache
and extensions.en-US.cache
from the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Extensions
folder. These files are rebuilt the next time you launch
If you need access to the Visual Studio startup log to debug what's happening, run devenv.exe /log
command from the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE
directory (assuming you are on a 64 bit machine). The log file generated is located here:
%AppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\ActivityLog.xml
Solution 4 - Xna
There seems to be some confusion over how to get this set up for the Express version specifically. Using the Windows Desktop (WD) version of VS Express 2012, I followed the instructions in Steve B's and Rick Martin's answers with the modifications below.
- In step 2 rather than copying to
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\XNA Game Studio 4.0"
, copy to"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\WDExpressExtensions\Microsoft\XNA Game Studio 4.0"
- In step 4, after making the changes also add the line
<Edition>WDExpress</Edition>
(you should be able to see where it makes sense) - In step 5, replace
devenv.exe
withWDExpress.exe
- In Rick Martin's step, replace
"%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Extensions"
with"%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\WDExpress\11.0\Extensions"
I haven't done a lot of work since then, but I did manage to create a new game project and it seems fine so far.