Windows Phone 8 SDK Blog Announcement and XNA Confusion

Question

In the Windows Phone 8 SDK announcement blog post, I saw this:

XNA Game Studio – Enables you to continue developing games for existing Windows Phone 7.1 devices, along with desktop and Xbox 360.

However, targeting anything other than Windows Phone for XNA Profile will result in a Visual Studio 2012 error of "Windows/Xbox is not a supported platform for this version of XNA Game Studio."

So, am I reading the blog post incorrectly? Is it possible to target Windows and Xbox using the XNA Game Studio that comes packaged with the Windows 8 SDK as the blog post indicates?

Answer 1

I'm not sure I'm following. The Windows Phone SDK only comes with XNA for Windows Phone.

If you want to target Windows PC or Xbox, you'll have to download the full Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0 which contains the SDK for the remaining platforms.

Answer 2

Just got this response from Aaron Stebner (Microsoft Employee):

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpdevelop/thread/4a608bd0-e8a1-42ba-a1c9-d68f828604a7

The blog post is incorrect. The Windows Phone SDK 8.0 includes support for building Windows Phone games that use the XNA Framework, but it does not include support for building Windows or Xbox 360 games that use the XNA Framework.

If you are developing Windows games or Xbox 360 games that use the XNA Framework, you must continue to use an edition of Visual Studio 2010 and either the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh. Both of those products can be installed side-by-side with the Windows Phone SDK 8.0.

Thanks!