Tom, I appreciate your forward looking vision that began a decade ago. MDX (and later XNA) started a movement that brought thousands of new developers into the Microsoft/.NET world. As a result of MDX/XNA, I enjoyed some amazing successes in my career as a .NET developer.

I feel like all that remains of XNA is a burning pile of rubble. (I don’t care to start a useless flame war, but for those of us who were there since the beginning, we’ve witnessed a great opportunity built and then squandered)

I’ve used both C++/DirectX and XNA, and I know which platform I preferred working with over the years.

The new content pipeline tools in VS2012 are definitely a step in the right direction. It does not feel like a serious, concerted effort. The tools are weak compared to what was offered in the XNA 1.0 pipeline. They introduced a new (but arbitrary) file format (CMO), force all texture conversions to DXT5, and then name mangle all of the output. I’m hopeful that we’ll see fixes and improvements along the way. But at best, it is all very ‘beta’ and it pales in comparison to what shipped with XNA.

I too have been an Blizzard fan owning all their games up to this point. But they’ve managed to destroy their own legend, with such a sub par game. It’s not Blizzard anymore, it’s just another game development company, that happened to release a bad (very) bad game.

It was fun while it lasted, and this was bound to happend one day, Blizzard doesn’t make games because they want to make awesome games anymore, they just want every peny in your wallet by any means.
Time to move on.

Good point, I hadn’t even considered that! I was using it across very tiny portions of code. Besides who ever allocates so much stuff!

This could miss allocations if the code being measured happened to allocate so much that it triggered a GC, though. It allocates, GC happens, then a tiny amount more allocation happens, then the Dispose method runs and sees used memory has only gone up a little, so fails to notice there is a problem.

You could fix that by having the constructor also instantiate a new WeakReference(new object()). If that weak reference is invalid when Dispose runs, you know a GC took place in the interim, so should break even if memory usage does not appear to have gone up.

Now, you shouldn’t take any responsibility on the fact that making games is harder than before because it really isn’t.
As you said, you made it simpler to get your hands on but you cannot make it simpler to make good games.

It’s like asking Adobe developers to make it simpler to make good movies or illustrations.

You were a tooling developer and you achieve what you were supposed to: provide tools.

To take a middle-age comparison, you were this unknown guy that brought blacksmiths with better anvils, hammers and perfoming ovens so that warriors could get weapons.
Either the weapons were good or not depended on the blacksmith talent.
Game developers are just these blacksmiths and players are warriors 😉