XNA in Zune gimped into uselessness?

[NewsBot]

Whole lot of theorycraft follow but I'm usually right in these things. :D

 

I was here thinking, what's the obviously most popular application of .NET in a device like Zune that, obviously, cannot be done with XNA but very likely could be done in Flash. (because of the forward thinking of the people who make the product)

 

Without even looking the documentations or specifications of XNA in Zune I can predict some of it by looking at decisions have MS take in past in development of WPF, Silverlight and XNA overall: There will be no way to open TCP sockets over the wireless and there will be no way to push arbitrary bytes to to the decoder codecs in the device. Thus there will be no way to implement what everyone wants: Playback of the millions of shoutcast internet radios or running your own radio from a home server that could be programmed live from the Zune.

 

Instead, per the usual Microsoft line of thinking, there will be API's to play files already on the device by, at best,*passing a filename or at worst popping up a premade UI to select a song. To play effect sounds of course the content pipeline will be utilized to pre-package files into approved formats (wav) instead of possibility to synthesize the effects or blend multiple audio files on the device to create actually interesting applications.

 

And the stated reason for all this is of course security, instead of properly auditing the native code used in the device to not do bad things when random bytes from a shoutcast radio server attempt to use the zune to infiltrate the computers in your LAN through the broken decoders it's just easier to simply prevent doing anything cool and out of the box. Even if you wrote the decoders in c# (likely not fast enough for the device esp if unsafe isn't allowed(?)) I bet there aren't APIs to push the audio directly from managed code. (actually there is in XNA now but my bet is they'll remove them from Zune version of this)

 

 

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