Managing References

References are the bane of your existence if they aren’t working. Once they are set up, everything will go swimmingly.

In XNA there are two sets of references, one for the project like normal, and one for the Content Pipeline. The ones required for swf2xna to run successfully are highlighted in the following image.

So for the project:

• Box2dXNA
• V2DRuntime

And for the Content Pipeline:

• VexPipeline
• VexPipelineReader

If they are not added correctly you can delete them, then right click on the references tree item and “AddReference”. From here you can go to the browse tab and find them (project references can all be found in the V2DRuntime project’s bin folder, Content Pipeline references are all in the VexPipeline project’s bin folder.

Another alternative is to add the V2DRuntime project to your game (right click the top Solution tree item, select “Add” and use “Add Existing Project”. This will give you the ability to seamlessly edit and compile changes in the runtime if that is what you wish.

Note: If you make changes code the content pipeline uses, the Flash files will be reparsed every build. This is due to a bug in the content pipeline as far as I can tell, and takes a long time compared to not reparsing them. The workaround is to rebuild the Flash file(s) in your project.