My bud Brian pointed out that we have an excellent guide to help you make sure your apps are ready for Windows Vista.  If you plan on your app running on Windows Vista, this is pretty much mandatory reading (not to mention some cool information in there to boot).

http://www.microsoft.com/xna/  Need I say more?

Check out Michael Klucher's post on the XNA CTP we're releasing next week!

For those of you attending the GDC, you should make a point of attending these sessions to hear more about XNA:

“XNA Studio: Introduction to XNA”
Presenter:  Brian Keller, Product Manager, Microsoft XNA
Wednesday (March 22, 2006)   12:00pm — 1:00pm, Room A8
XNA Studio is a new product Microsoft is building to help tame the costs and complexity associated with game development. This introductory session will provide an overview of XNA Studio and describe how game studios will be able to use it to help manage their content creation and content builds.

“XNA Studio: Advanced Features of XNA’s Build System”
Presenter:  Frank Savage, Development Manager, Microsoft XNA
Wednesday (March 22, 2006)   4:00pm — 5:00pm, Room C3
XNA Build is Microsoft’s upcoming solution focused on content pipelines and game content builds. This demo-heavy session shows how XNA enables incremental content builds, dependency tracking, debugging and more. XNA can be customized to meet your unique requirements – whether you create a pipeline from scratch or adapt an existing one

Frank's presentation will also be given the day prior, Tuesday, as part of the Microsoft Game Developer Day.  That talk will be from 10am-11am.

See you there!

By now, those of you that follow Managed DirectX or XNA discussions have seen Tom Miller's post, as well as Mike Zintel's blog.

Just like Tom Miller, I (and about 100+ other people) was a part of the whole "Microsoft Gaming" merger a couple months ago.  In my case, my workload has gone to insane levels because I'm picking up some other responsibilities on the XBox and XNA side.  I think things will settle down a bit after the Game Developers Conference next week (look for me at the Microsoft booth if you want to talk!).

Speaking of XNA....we have some wicked cool stuff to announce and demonstrate at the GDC.  We even have a prototype of a CLR-based graphics app running on a 360 dev kit!  Drool-tastic :P

I do want to say one thing about Tom's departure from the DirectX team...it doesn't mean the end of DirectX support in the Common Language Runtime.  Quite the opposite.  We love the CLR and we are seeing more and more adoption and usage of the CLR in conjunction with DirectX applications.  We will have some exciting announcements in the not too distant future about where we are going along that path.  Stay tuned!

But I will also second Tom's request: Please let me know how you're using Managed DirectX, especially if it's for a commercial product.  One of our biggest challenges is reaching the broad community and understanding how you're using our APIs, and I admit it's particularly difficult for Managed DirectX.  We continue to be surprised about what companies are using it and how.

I've had Burnout:Revenge for the XBox for several months now and absolutely loved it, but I went ahead and got it for the Xbox 360.  The gameplay tweaks are really nice, including ditching the odd boost-feature in the crashbreaker modes.  But what has really made this game rock is the detail you can see when it's played on an HDTV system (the not-very-professional photo was taken on my TV).  This is really a great example of where the experience with the 360 really rocks.  Gamespot gave this one an 8.8 out of 10, but I think it's closer to a 9.5 (a few minor gameplay annoyances keep it from scoring the vaunted 10.0 :) ).