Today we are happy to release the first preview release of Xamarin for Xbox One.
This release allows developers to build .NET applications that run on the Game Partition and gives them access to a comprehensive set of .NET APIs including support for .NET Standard 2. Running in the Game Partition gives exclusive access to the full hardware as opposed to UWP apps running in the App Partition.
Xamarin for Xbox One leverages Mono’s JIT compiler during development, allowing you to quickly iterate when working on your game code. Release builds of your game will be fully statically compiled using Mono’s Full Ahead of Time Compilation engine as JIT compilation is not allowed in published games.
The Xamarin SDK for Xbox One bundles the MonoGame Xbox One backend and associated tooling as well as a MonoGame Xbox One Visual Studio template to help you get started. This preview is mostly useful for developers building their games on the MonoGame framework.
Current Limitations: The current release only supports .NET as the main entry point into your application and only offers support for the .NET and MonoGame APIs. We are working on both allowing developers to embed C# code into an existing C++ codebase as well as surfacing all of the native WinRT APIs, Xbox One Platform APIs and Xbox Live Services APIs to C#, these will come in an upcoming preview release.
##Getting Access
To get access to the Xamarin SDK for Xbox One please fill out this form. To be eligible you have to be enrolled in the ID@Xbox program. Once your request has been approved you will be invited to a GitHub repository where you will be able to download releases and submit issues. You will also receive an invitation to a Slack channel where you can ask for help and discuss the product with the team.
We hope you like it!
Regards,
Niklas Therning
Microsoft Xamarin Consoles team lead