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Thanks to a lot of hard work in the background the Monogame team have implemented continuous NuGet delivery and enabled Windows 10 deveopment through new UAP/UWP project support
For a long time MonoGame had only spurious updates and not a lot of outward activity (as opposed to the frantic and sometimes chaotic internal goings on in the mass of community contributions), this garnered such comments as “Is MonoGame dead?”. The team started a trend just over a year ago by releasing development NuGet packages and publishing the development builds on the main MonoGame.Net website. Still however, there was a drive in the team to do more and make their efforts more public. Fast forward to today and not only have the team released 2 major updates in as many months but they have also implemented an automated NuGet delivery solution.
Thanks to a lot of hard work in the background the team have implemented continuous NuGet delivery in two phases:
NuGet package generation on all successful Minor builds to the public NuGet servers, e.g. 3.4, 3.5, 3.6. These should be more frequent than previous builds. No firm schedule has been published yet but we can expect fairly regular now that it’s automated
Development NuGet package production on every successful MonoGame build. These are published to the MonoGame development NuGet feed (see detail below for using this, not for the faint of heart)
So what do we get? Well, the current NuGet landscape now stands as follows:
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The obvious main contender that caused two releases in the recent months was the addition of the new Universal Windows Project (UWP / UAP), launched just in time for all the big announcements at the Microsoft Build conference this year. This opens the door to full Windows 10 development and all the platforms it currently supports:
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Starting with NuGet is fast and easy, just download the installer from the MonoGame.Net downloads page for your platform of choice:
MonoGame 3.4 Pipeline GUI Tool for MacOS standalone installer
At the moment, you still need the main installer to get access to the awesome MonoGame Content Builder tool. The team are still looking at alternate ways to deliver this tool but for now it’s just in the installer. If you wish, you can then start a new project using the built in project templates and/or update your MonoGame / XNA references in your project with the MonoGame NuGet’s mentioned earlier from the public NuGet server. With that you are ready to rock.
If you are the adventurous sort you can get your releases even faster (especially if a much needed fix has just been pushed to the repository). You have two options, you can either grab the development release installers (updated with each successful build):
NOTE: The new addin for MonoDevelop/XamarinStudio for Linux is coming soon! For now build from source.
MonoGame for Visual Studio (requires VS2010, VS2012, VS2013 or VS2015 and the latest DirectX Runtime)
MonoGame for Mac (includes the Mac and iOS assemblies, the Pipeline Tool, and the installs the addin for Xamarin Studio if installed)
Standalone installer for the MonoGame Pipeline Tool for Mac (requires Mono)
You could also add our develop branch NuGet feed to your IDE to get the latest development assemblies, here’s how to add it.
Open your Package Manager Settings and select Package Sources (as shown below)
You can get to the Package Manager Settings by either going through your editors Tools menu or using the Manage button when editing/adding your NuGet packages.
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Click on the + symbol in the top-right corner of the window to add a new feed.
Select the new option in the top list and enter a suitable Name for your new feed and paste in the NuGet dev feed link (shown below) in to the source field: http://teamcity.monogame.net/guestAuth/app/nuget/v1/FeedService.svc
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Click OK and your new feed is ready, Just select it (instead of the Public NuGet source) when adding / updating your NuGet packages as shown here:
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*Note the screenshot above might look a bit different to what you are used to as it’s the all new and latest NuGet UI
Previously feeds appeared as separate branches in the selection tree.
Obviously, if you are extremely crazy, you can also opt to bypass all this install or NuGet option and just use the MonoGame source direct from the GitHub project 
As ever, the MonoGame project Samples have been updated with the latest releases (Plus a minor clean up fix to tidy up the removal of the old NuGet packages)
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If you have a sample or project you would like to propose to the MonoGame samples, craft it to the standards used by the samples repository and submit it, we’d love to see more. For now we’re working hard to get all our current sample games fully updated across all platforms.
MonoGame is really getting some love of late, especially on NuGet. While checking and testing out the automated NuGet packages, I came across several new packages created specifically to support MonoGame games, here;s just a snippet of what I’ve found:
TexturePacker-MonoGameLoader – A handy tool for packing your images into spritesheets / atlases
SharpNav.MonoGame – A nav mesh pathfinding framework created for MonoGame
MerjTek.WpfIntegration – WPF framework that integrates with OpenGL or DIrectX
Supernova Particle System for MonoGame – Particle engine for MonoGame (although last updated in 2013?)
Farseer Physics Engine – Physics engine library for MonoGame (although I’ve also heard of a PCL version)
Starbound Input – An input event library for MonoGame
DPSF – Another fantastic particle system engine
Empty Keys UI – XAML Based UI framework for MonoGame and other game engines
These are but a few, keep an eye out for others appearing.
Well that’s enough MonoGame news for now. Still got to work on my beginner tutorials and a few other bits. Laters
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