Rendering a textured cube

XNA Game Studio Express provides a number of helpful how-to guides. One such guide demonstrates the use of the framework's default material class "BasicEffect" to render a cube using 3D primitives.

When you run the sample code, you will see a colored cube rendered on screen (seen on the right).

That great. So now how do you render a bitmap textured cube?

Initially, I got a black cube instead of the expected rendered one. After tinkering around, I have managed to load a bitmap and assigned it to the basic effect material.

Here are a couple of learning points:

1. To use bitmap textures, you need to :
• Assign a loaded texture to the BasicEffect.Texture property
• Enable texture rendering, set BasicEffect.TextureEnabled to true
  
2. The framework calls Initialize() before LoadGraphicsContent(). Hence you should only assign your texture reference to the basic-effect material after you have loaded the bitmap.

Here is a screenshot of modded cube on the right. You can also download the project files here (UseBasicEffect.zip).

Please let me know if the link works and other comments.