I mentioned a while ago about XNA updates being mentioned on the XNA Team Blog. I'm still curious to know, however, if support will ever be added for Game Explorer without the use of my hack.

As it is, my method relies on a rarely used option for the C# compiler, the /win32res command line switch. Unfortunately the use of this switch conflicts with the usual way of setting the application icon as well as the generation of a version resource from assembly metadata. This is because .NET resources and Win32 resources are not the same thing, and when the time came to deal with resources for .NET assemblies the Win32 ones lost out.

As far as I see it, to integrate Game Explorer support into XNA Game Studio would require some non-trivial changes to the C# compiler included as part of the .NET Framework, changes we're not likely to see before .NET 3.5 comes out, if no earlier. What's needed is dealing with Win32 resources in the compiler the same way they are dealt with in the native linker – rather than throw out all but one collection of resources (a .res file) merge them all into the resource section of the final PE file. This will allow the generation of the version resource, inclusion of any required application manifest resource, and the inclusion of other resources such as icons and the Game Explorer GDF and thumbnail image. The only cause of failure then would be two resources of the same type claiming to have the same identifier.

Support for Game Explorer is something that Microsoft should be serious about, if they really want to promote XNA in game development on Windows. Hopefully, they will make the changes to the C# compiler to make this simple and efficient.