Some big news out of Microsoft today... XNA Game Studio Express will be getting and update in April!  Checkout the XNA Team Blog for a full list of the changes and additions to the upcoming version!

Head on over to http://creators.xna.com and register for the XNA Creators Club Online community. There is all kinds of great stuff there including:

• A brand new starter kit - Marblets
• Several samples including a skinning (animation) sample using the XNA Framework Content Pipeline!
• Downloadable sample games.
• New developer forums.
• Video tutorials.
• Much, much, more!

Some details about the Dream Build Play contest have creeped out the of the GDC... The contest will be offering over $40,000 in cash and prizes... the grad prize winner will not only get $10,000 but they will also have the opportunity to publish their creation on the XBLA!  They also talked about the release of Schizoid, the first XBLA game created using XNA... That makes you wonder how and Arcade title is being released when we still don't have access to network functions in XNA but maybe this is something from inside MS built using a new pre-release version of XNA... who knows... exciting times though.  Hopefully the entire community will start to pick things up as the GDC wraps up.

Over at Gamasutra they have just posted a pretty interesting Q&A with Microsoft's David Edery, the Worldwide Games Portfolio Plannerfor XBLA... Edery gives the community some insight on what makes a good XBLA title... pretty much a must read if you are interested in taking the game you develop in XNA and moving onto some real commercial distribution on the 360 platform. Head on over and checkout the article...

SpriteCache aims to be a complete replacement for XNA's SpriteBatch class. The objective is to create a more powerful and robust solution without sacrificing ease of use. There is little to no performance difference between the two classes.  Some of the features:

• Translation, Scaling, Rotation
• Colour modulation (tinting) of individual sprite corners
• Easy shader attachment (on a per sprite basis!)
• Draw calls similar to SpriteBatch

The folks over at Dream, Build,  Play have posted details on the first part of their contest.  In what they are calling the 'Warmup Challenge - Relatives of Spacewar', the goal is to create a game based on the SpaceWar Starter Kit.  From the "How to Play" page:

Create a game based on the Spacewar Starter Kit... either the Spacewar codebase or content, or both. The only requirement: Your game must be derived from the version of Spacewar that's a part of XNA Game Studio Express. Use as much or as little of the Spacewar Starter Kit as you like. Just remember that the relationship to the Spacewar Starter Kit must be obvious to our judges.

The five best entries will each receive a prize of $500, but you need to act fast, as the deadline for submitting your game  is Feb 28, 2007!

We have received word from the folks over at http://www.karvonite.com that their free .Net Persistence Framework now has support for both XNA and the .Net Compact Framework, including the XBox 360.  From the site:

Karvonite is a FREE persistence framework with a propietary data storage engine for the .NET Framework 2 and it focuses on the manipulation and persistence. This technology provides a new direction for how small to midsize applications can store and deploy data. Karvonite is not an O/R mapping tool for a very good reason. There is no relational world to map to. In Karvonite, object data is persisted to an object library.

Karvonite persistence framework is well-suited for applications where XML files or .NET serialization features are not enough and the horsepower of a SQL engine is unnecessary.

The Dream Build Play website has finally launched!  Registration is up and working but it looks like we will have to wait until February 5th for the rest of the details about the contest... Run over and register right away!!!