SFML Tutorial: Hello World

In this tutorial, we'll create a SFML window and draw a shape and some text, and demonstrate a basic animation.

This tutorial assumes that you already have the SFML.Net libraries and their dependencies, but we will create a new project file for this tutorial. This and all future tutorials will assume that you are using Visual Studio (however, it's definitely possible to use SFML.Net with Mono!).

A portion of the code used in this tutorial (and likely future tutorials) is taken from the official examples for SFML.Net.

Setting up SFML.Net

SMFL.Net is a binding of the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library that allows us to use its functions in C# and VB.Net. It's simple to use (hence the name) and portable (although my tutorials will only focus on Windows).

However, setting it up requires some extra work compared to some other libraries. The pre-built libraries available on the SFML website are not only a year old (so they're missing quite a few changes made since then), but the dependencies included probably won't work and one of the DLLs is MIA (technically it wasn't missing at the time, but now it's an important part of the library).

(I know things have been mostly OpenTK up until this point, but I needed a bit of a break. And if these SFML.Net tutorials go on long enough, they'll end up back in OpenTK territory, so don't worry!)