XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 - Why should I care?

Introduction

Around the time the first Windows Phone 7 devices were released to the market, one popular sentence you heard was "every Silverlight developer is a Windows Phone 7 developer" – and that's true. Silverlight is Microsoft's main platform to do Windows Phone 7 development, and every desktop Silverlight programmer will feel comfortable in the new mobile programming environment instantly. Sure there are differences and libraries specific to the devices, but you won't have to learn a new programming language or new ways to define your UI, and you can use the same development environment you've been using for normal Silverlight development all the time. That's great!

However, Silverlight is not the only possibility to create software for Windows Phone 7 devices, there's also XNA. Most people that are interested in developing for the new mobile platform probably have already read about it, mostly in the context of game programming. This article tries to give a quick overview of XNA on the mobile platform for Silverlight developers who have not dealt with XNA in detail before. It explains the possibilities of interaction between Silverlight and XNA, and why you as a Silverlight developer should care about XNA even if you don't want to develop games.

In successive parts of this series, we'll go into the details of programming 2D games for Windows Phone 7 using XNA, with special focus on those parts that require a change of thinking when you are coming from a Silverlight background. I strongly encourage you to comment on each part and request more information about topics you are interested in. If possible, your feedback will directly result in the design of future articles.

The Windows Phone 7 Platform

The base of all development on the Windows Phone 7 platform is a .NET Framework managed runtime code sandbox based on the Compact Framework know from previous mobile platforms (Windows CE/Mobile). This means that all application development for the phone devices is done in managed code and in a protected sandbox. On top of that, the following structure is established:

As you can see, both Silverlight and XNA share a great amount of the available functionality. The base class library provides all the basic plumbing needed in most software and is similar to what you know from other platforms like desktop Silverlight. Neither this base class library nor most of the provided services specific to the Windows Phone 7 platform are tied to Silverlight or XNA per se. In fact, it's even possible for great parts of Silverlight and XNA to interact with each other and to be used side-by-side. Let's see how that works.

下文见原文：http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-0-Why-should-I-care.aspx