Hi jgo community o/
I've made a game and also been working with groups of people that have been developing games for WP7 using C# and XNA 4.0.
It's very portable and all the games work well on the phone. I've realized I can achieve a lot with just C# and XNA 2D.
There won't be any support of XNA in Windows 8 as far as I know. It is not portable like Java. Even XNA on XBox and on phones does not work in the same way.
I'm wondering if this is comparable to standard Java. Using AWT, Swing. That is, not using OpenGL or other libraries.
No, in no way it is comparable with Java. Mono .NET implementation for GNU Linux and Microsoft .NET implementation are noticeably different.
Bluntly you could put it this way:
The exact same game made in both Java and C# with XNA 4.0 is run on a Windows Phone 7 ( or anything, I just want to point out that the hardware isn't exactly top notch ). Which game will run "better"? ( Faster? ).
C# is slower than Java. Just compare Quake .NET and Jake 2...
Putting aside things like which one is easier/faster to code on ( Which depends a lot on the IDE ) although XNA already has done a lot of work for us, it's ( sorry for being so blunt ) pretty much like an empty Canvas in Java.
I'm sorry if this is obvious, but afaik XNA is built on DirectX - would it be correct to assume that DirectX > Java AWT? And therefore that DirectX == OpenGL in performance? And ultimately C#+XNA >>> std Java?
Input appreciated, thanks!
Jon
You compare cars with tomatoes

OpenGL is faster than Direct3D according to Nvidia and XNA is going to die, why do you still use it?
reference (in French, sorry, use Google Translate or an equivalent service)