I’ve touched on this a few times when people have mentioned the grass being greener on XNA - MS have been gradually nerfing it with each release - and stumbled across this post which paints a pretty bleak picture of XNA and it’s future:
It would seem (to me at least) that MS would rather people play their games on their consoles or handhelds, and desktop gaming is becoming much lower priority.
Well, there you go. XNA looked a bit lame to me to begin with though so… who cares 
As for DirectX being subsumed into the Windows APIs, that’s probably about time - it’s matured enough now and the pace of API flux has stabilised I think. I don’t think this bodes ill at all for desktop gaming - in fact it might actually help it a bit, as we’ll be able to rely on a working, pre-installed DirectX in future. The future being a very long way away looking at how XP is still running about 50% of the world’s PCs.
Cas
XNA was actually quite accessible and a good place to start learning, but it kept nagging at me that it’s basically single-platform (i.e. Microsoft-platform) and requires redistributable XNA stuff to be installed (which are not, by default, on many systems). So far, LWJFL and Slick2D have proven to be a better choice for me.
Still, its bit sad, because it’s quite a nice library for indie developers, I think.
I have to say I really do not like XNA 
Maybe because I’m too into OpenGL… I had to write a game with it and hell tis framework kept punshing me in the face. To be honest mostly because I always hat to begin a spriteBatch to draw something, and between the begin and end call I dould not change the matrix (or is this possible in some stupid way MS thinks is good? :D)…
I stick with OpenGL at least until I must work with Direct X
Yeah, a lot of the APIs were classic Microsoft - make it easy to do the basic stuff, but as soon as you go off the beaten path you find out that it’s not very configurable, and you either have to do things in a completely different way, or even switch to another lower level API.
The SpriteBatch is a good example IIRC. It’s not much cop compared to SPGL or Slick or any of what I’d consider the Java equivalents. And with the bonus extra snag that it uses super-sekrit MS shaders so although you can reproduce the functionality you won’t be able to make the same performance optimisations because you’re not allowed to use the same shader operations.
Not so quick. It looks like next visual studio is getting a lot a game related components added to it.
Interesting. Source?
A quick web search yielded:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2011/09/14/announcing-visual-studio-11-developer-preview.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2011/11/08/10235150.aspx
Some videos (I haven’t watched):