I'm going through the WROX press book "Professional XNA Game Programming for XBox 360 and Windows", written by Benjamin Nitschke. Now that I have some perspective on how non-ideal Managed Direct X was, I am finding this pass through the book to be more enlightening. I'm taking notes on things I am discovering as I read through the book.

On a side note, there's an Application Model Overview in the XNA Game Studio 2.0 docs (available after you install XNA Game Studio 2.0).

Game class

This is the top-level class provided by the XNA Framework. Provides basic graphics device initialization, game logic, rendering code, and a game loop. It has basic game time also, supporting fixed or variable time steps.

Important Internal Objects

• Components - collection of GameComponent, which are code module class for Update, Draw, and Dispose interfaces
• Content - instance to ContentManager, which loads assets processed by the Content Pipeline. Only has Load<T>() and Unload() method handling: Model, Effect, SpriteFont, Texture, Texture2D, Texture3D and TextureCube.
• GraphicsDevice - Primitive-based rendering, shader creation, related resource management
• Services
• Window

Important Methods

The main public methods below form the basic game logic:

• Focus Events: OnActivated(), OnDeactivated()
• Rendering: BeginDraw(), EndDraw()
• GameLoop: Tick(), Update()
• Initialization: Initialize(), BeginRun(), EndRun(), Finalize()
• Content Management: LoadContent(), LoadGraphicsContent(), UnloadContent(), UnloadGraphicsContent()

GraphicsDevice

Important Properties

• 3D Env: ClipPlanes, DepthStencilBuffer
• Current Render States: PixelShader, RenderState, VertexShader
• Vertex Processing: VertexDeclaration, Indices,
• Device Processing State: SoftwareVertexProcessing
• Resources: Textures, Vertices, VertexTextures
• Device Capabilities: DriverLevel, GraphicsDeviceCapabilities, GraphicsDeviceStatus
• Display Setting: DisplayMode, RasterStatus, CreationParameters
• Device Readiness: IsDisposed

Important Methods

• Buffer Management: Clear(), GetRenderTarget(), SetRenderTarget()
• Presentation: GetGammaRamp(), SetGammaRamp(), Present(), Reset()
• Resource Management: Dispose(), EvictManagedResources(), ResolveBackBuffer()
• Drawing: DrawIndexedPrimitive(), DrawPrimitives(), DrawUserIndexedPrimitives(), DrawUserPrimitives()
• PixelShader: SetPixelShaderConstant(), many GetPixelShader...() calls to access registers (?)
• VertexShader: SetVertexShaderConstant(), many GetVertexShader...() calls to access register (?)