Asynchronous content loading in XNA 4.0

Since I first started using XNA (back around the time when XNA 3.0 was just released) I'd been wanting some way to load content without it stalling the main thread.

The problem is that many of the tutorials written for XNA load content item by item up-front when the game or application loads. While this is happening nothing will refresh on screen and if you're loading and decompressing a lot of files it helps to have an animation or something going on while the content loads.

That's where asynchronous loading comes in to play and being a bit of a noob with C# threading I found a nice little extension simply called XNA Content Tracker.

By creating an instance of the ContentTracker and using that to load your content you can specify whether you want the loaded in the standard way or if you want them to be loaded in a worker thread while your main game loop continues to execute. This extension has been an integral part of my engine and during my recent update to XNA 4.0 I went looking for an updated version (without letting Visual Studio just do the upgrade).

Unfortunately the original XNA 3.1 version does not appear to have been updated to XNA 4.0 however I did find a project on GitHub where someone had upgraded the project and also fixed a few minor bugs, the project can be downloaded here:

https://github.com/dubajj/XNA-Content-Tracker

Many thanks to Roonda and Dubajj for their work on this, without it I would have to delve into threading myself which frankly I don't have the time to do!

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