When you make a video game, there are essential things you need to create, like menus and other interface elements that let the user navigate and control your game, set options, etc.
Now XNA Game Studio is ostensibly a package that allows you to create games, doing a lot of essential stuff under the hood. It's surprising then, that it's on version 3.1, and it doesn't include any prebuilt GUI elements, like buttons, drop-down menus, etc. There are game engines you can use in conjunction with XNA, and stand-alone GUI packages as well, but this seems like such a basic element of a game framework I'm pretty disappointed it's not included. I don't want to waste my time building my own text field from scratch, and it was time consuming to sift through the various options for third-party solutions and find one with halfway decent examples and documentation. I started messing around with Neoforce Controls, and it looks like it's going to work reasonably well.
I'd be interested to hear from any other devs using XNA whether they build their GUIs from scratch, using a game engine that includes GUI elements, or use a stand-along GUI package.
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you could give Squid a try. it's an engine independent sdk with samples for xna, slimdx and tv3d. written by me ;) - http://www.ionstar.org/?page_id=4
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