I am considering learning monogame but after some brief research they look identical. I am very confused. On the internet people are saying that xna is dead and is no longer supported but if monogame and xna are the same thing, then isn’t monogame dead as well? Can anybody shed some light on this please.
XNA was developed by Microsoft, but was abandoned a few years ago after the release of 4.0. MonoGame is a open source implementation of that API and still being developed actively to support more platforms. They do the same, but arent the same. It’s like Microsoft wrote a text file reader and stopped updating it and someone else remade it the same way but keeps updating it for new platforms.
XNA = dead
MonoGame = alive
The answer is yes, but no.
XNA will give you access to Windows XP, Windows Phone 7, and Xbox 360 (XBLIG is shut down, not sure about Arcade). You can also test, but not use Xbox Live on PC.
Simply download Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone. Or Visual Studio C# Express 2010 and XNA 4.0 Refresh.
MonoGame allows you to use Visual Studio, Xamarin Studio, MonoDevelop, and perhaps other IDE’s. And allows access to every other platform that XNA doesn’t run on.
Both are slightly different how you add “Content/Assets” to the IDE and compile. Other than that they’re practically the same and both are useful in their own way.