There has recently been a new release of TexturePacker ( http://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker ). As such I’ve written a blog post about how you might use this, with your MonoGame workflow, to make it easier to handle your sprite sheets and animation.
For those that haven’t used TexturePacker the blog post should give a good explanation of how to use it - I’ve also included beginner level instructions for creating a TexturePacker sprite sheet and then, using MonoGame, creating a character animation from that sprite sheet targetting (a) iOS using Xamarin Studio and (b) the windows8 app store using Visual Studio.
Advanced TexturePacker users will know that you can define the format of the sprite data file that is created by TexturePacker, however to make things easier for beginners there is now an export format targetted at MonoGame - and, with the help of the guys from CodeAndWeb, I’ve created a Nuget code package that can be consumed by your MonoGame app to load the sprite sheet - and provide helper methods to easily render your graphics/animations on screen. So, it might be that the blog post is useful to more than just beginners.
My blog post can be found at the link below. Any comments/feedback on the post please let me know. If this is useful to people then I’ll happily write more MonoGame blog posts. I intend to write a similar blog post about their ‘physics editor’ soon as well.