Adding a reference to XNA isn’t as simple as it appears, it would seem. According to Stephen Stryrchak (full thread here),
“Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward. The (XNA) redist installs the runtime as a runtime, not as an SDK. The Add Reference dialog doesn’t enumerate assemblies from the GAC, which is where the runtime is installed.
In order to be able to reference the assemblies, you’ll need to copy them out of your GAC after installing the redist, and put them in another folder. Then when you add your references, you’ll need to browse to the folder where you put the copies. At runtime, your game will use the ones from the GAC, but at design-time you need to get them from somewhere else.
Please note also that you will not have Intellisense documentation if you do this. That is, you’ll get statement completion, but there won’t be any descriptions of types, methods, or arguments for any of the XNA Framework types.”
Oh well. Tedious, isn’t it?
