Remember that Game Studio software Microsoft released a while ago that let anyone develop games for the XBox 360? Believe it or not, they just released 3.0 beta that lets anyone write games for the Zune as well! This tutorial is going go through all of the software needed and then demonstrate how to create a simple 'Hello World' application that will run on your Zune device.

1. Download and Install the Software

All right, so let's get started. You're going to need to download and install a few applications before you can even think about programming the Zune.

• Upgrade the Zune to the 3.0 firmware. This can be done automatically through the Zune desktop software.
• Install Visual Studio 2008 or the C# Express Edition.
• Download and install Game Studio Express 3.0 beta.
• Add the Zune to the Game Studio Device Center.

2. Create a New Zune Game Project

Once you've installed Game Studio 3.0 beta, a new project type will be added to Visual Studio. All you have to do is create a new project and select Zune Game.

When you create the project, Visual Studio is going to go off and generate a lot of code for you - which is good. All we then have to do is add some code where they tell us to.

3. Add a Font

Before we can add any text to the screen, we need a font. Fonts on the Zune are represented by SpriteFont objects and are added to the project's Content using Visual Studio.

Once inside that dialog, you'll want to choose the SpriteFont object.

What that actually creates for us is an XML file containing font information. The default file will work just fine and I didn't need to modify it at all.

4. Write Some Code

This is probably the easiest step in the entire tutorial. All that's left to do is simply print the text, "Hello World!", to the screen using the font we just added to the project. The first thing you need to do is locate the Draw function that Visual Studio was nice enough to generate for us. It will be located in Game1.cs and should look something like this:

This function is called roughly 30 times per second and is where you'll put all of the code to draw things to the screen. Here's how to modify that function to draw some text:

That's it! Three extra lines of code are all that's required to throw text on the Zune's screen. We first call Begin on the SpriteBatch to prepare the graphics device for drawing. We then call DrawString to print some text on the screen. The Content.Load function loads the font we added earlier and returns a SpriteFont object - I named my font "myFont". Normally you would load the font outside of the draw loop into a member variable so it didn't have to do it every time it draws. DrawString also takes the actual text you want to draw, the position, and the color. Lastly, call End to flush the sprite batch.

After you've got that code in there, all you have to do now is hit Run in Visual Studio (F5). After a few seconds of loading, the text should appear on your Zune. Since it doesn't look like Microsoft has emulators (or at least one I could find), here's an actual picture of the output on my Zune.

Once your game has been deployed to the Zune, it will also be accessible through the Zune's Game menu.

There's no easy way to distribute your Zune apps yet, but I'm sure games and applications will be added to the Zune marketplace shortly - once 3.0 is fully released. In the mean time, you're limited to building your own apps and sharing them with whoever is willing to download and build your source code. Speaking of source code, the Visual Studio 2008 project I created for this tutorial is available for download here.