Contentious-360
Contentious is a content management library for games written in .NET and Mono. I originally wrote what's now becoming Contentious (this is the third rewrite) because the XNA Content Pipeline just isn't very good for PC games; it might be a solid tool for 360 and WP7 development, but personally I don't really care about either. And despite not personally needing it ( ;-) ) I've quickly put together this package to go along with contentious, for those who do need XNA support.
Contentious is released under the ISC license, packaged in this repo as LICENSE.md.
ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: Contentious-360 is not a project that's really on my radar. If it works for you, awesome, and if it falls out of sync with the regular Contentious project, feel free to file an issue against the project, but it's not really my focus.
-Ed Ropple (ed+contentious@edropple.com); @edropple on Twitter
How It Works
Contentious is based around the ContentContext. At its core, ContentContext objects define a location (by default on disk, but at some point adapters for Android's weird file storage and a layer that can sit on top of XNA's ContentManager stuff) and a set of content types. Each content type contains a Type (what a given file resource will be turned into), a list of valid file extensions for this type, and an an optional sub-path within your content root where all files pertaining to this type will live (for example, you might have all Texture2D objects as .png and stored within $CONTENTROOT/Textures).
Once you've created a ContentContext, you load in a resource via the ContentContext.Load() method. Your path should be relative to the content subroot for that type; providing a file extension is optional but recommended; automatic extension appending is provided mostly for future XNA friendliness but I don't use it in my own projects. All content types that are loaded into a ContentContext must implement IDisposable, because when a ContentContext is disposed it will dispose of all objects created through it. (Possible future change: allow any object, but auto-dispose any IDisposables when done.)
ContentContexts also have the notion of parent contexts. In your application, you'll generally only explicitly create one global context via a constructor and the rest via ContentContext.CreateChildContext(). Child contexts inherit all of the parent's configuration values (even if they are changed after the child is created). They also check with their parent contexts before attempting to load a piece of content from disk, which can reduce multiple loads of the same content. For example, you might load a font file into your global context, then request the same font file from a child context; it would be stupid to load the font file into the child context a second time. Of course, the child context won't try to Dispose() of resources it doesn't own, and disposing of a parent context disposes of all child contexts.
Variants
XnaContentContext is for use in XNA games. The others can be found in the regular Contentious project at: