Tools & Environment for Professional Xbox 360 development?

just a general query. I've tried to research the tools and environment used for professional 360 development but there's not much available that isn't covered by NDAs.

(Please note that I'm not interested in XNA development.)

Q. What is the preferred/most-common dev environment for PRO development? Is it Visual Studio 2010? Or does the SDK provide a specific IDE and compiler/linker/build chain for the 360?

Q. What are the core frameworks provided through the SDK? A custom version of DX9开发者_如何转开发 for example? What else? Does the SDK or licensing provide access to commonly-used middleware for major components?

Q. Is OpenGL supported at any level on the 360 or would all code have to be ported to a DX version?

Q. In terms of tools (not technology) what are the main differences in developing a game for the 360, and, say, Windows?

Thanks for any help.

Please be aware that the development tools are held under a very strict NDA by Microsoft, so information is hard to come by.

Q. What is the preferred/most-common dev environment for PRO development? Is it Visual Studio 2010?

Yes, the professional Xbox 360 SDK integrates into the latest version of Visual Studio (so currently it integrates into 2010). This is the preferred and supported development environment,.

Q. What are the core frameworks provided through the SDK? A custom version of DX9 for example?

DirectX 9.0 is part of the SDK, and has only a few minor differences to the Windows version. The SDK also provides:

• Tools and utilities for development hardware
• A framework for creating rendering effects
• HLSL for working with shaders
• Various audio, video and graphics APIs
• The 'achievements' API
• Xbox LIVE and multiplayer/networking APIs
• The XInput API
• UI framework called XUI

Q. Is OpenGL supported at any level on the 360 or would all code have to be ported to a DX version?

No, there is no official OpenGL support. The Xbox 360 uses a custom version of Direct3D (so yes, all code would have to be ported to DirectX).