I've been in Istanbul and Ankara in Turkey for this week, and unfortunately it is coming to an end.

Together with Microsoft Turkey, we've been holding a full Xna workshop and I must say it's been really great. All the students attending have shown their interest in the subject. They got an assignment; to create a game in 3 days. A heavy task to undertake, you might say. Thus far, the results have been astonishing. They really picked up Xna fast and had stuff up and running really fast. I'm looking forward to seeing the result tomorrow.

Ofcourse, all material will be released in several places. Also, Microsoft has recorded all presentations on video and will also be available soon.

All hands-on-labs will be published over at Game Camp sometime next week.

I'll keep you all posted with the details as fast as I can.

The dates have changed for my workshop at METU in Turkey. The 23rd of June and for four whole days we'll have training in Xna, with focus on Xna 3.0.

We will try cover all of Xna in these four days, ranging from 2D and 3D graphics to sound and networking through Xbox Live as well.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched a completely redesigned creators club site alongside with a beta of the community games.

Just entering the site after logging in, you can see how easy it is to submit a community game:

The site is intuitive to use and in my opinion has a great design. Keep up the good work guys!

Another cool thing with XNA 3.0 is the ability to use MP3 and WMA files directly. This gives better compression for your music than the average of 27% before. These files can also be added directly to your content folder and used from the ContentManager as you would with any other content.

Kyle Schouviller has made an example of how to use this, check it out here.

Finally the CTP we've all been waiting for is here. You can now pick it up here and start developing for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune (if you're lucky enough to own one). Another great news with this is that it supports Visual Studio 2008. It's time to see if I can finally uninstall Visual Studio 2005.

Xbox 360 development and deployment is not supported by this CTP, unfortunately.

Anyhow.. More details can be found here.

I was asked earlier by Microsoft if I could hold a workshop in Turkey.

On the 20th of May I'll be heading down to Ankara and hold a 3-4 day workshop for a competition Microsoft is holding at the Middle East Technical University. I'm working on the agenda as we speak and thus far it's starting to look very interesting. My goal is to have a more or less complete walkthrough of XNA. Ambitious you might say. That's my plan at the moment at least. :)

We held an Xna workshop at the Gathering 2008 in the Easter and most of the material is now available for download from here.

The workshop went very well. We held a 10 hour introduction to Xna with interactive tutoring the first day, the second and third day Petri Wilhelmsen (also known as digitalerror0r) had a standby function for those who needed further help. In addition to having a workshop we held an Xna competition. First price was a Xbox360 Halo 3 edition with Halo3, second price a Windows Vista Ultimate and third price was a wireless network adapter for Xbox360, all the prices was courtesy of MSDN Norway (thanks again Rune Zakariassen).

We videotaped the different sessions we had, but the sound quality was really bad, we're working with different tools to see if we can enhance it and publish it on Game Camp.

Another event just appeared out of the blue.
We got approached by Microsoft yesterday and was asked if we had the resources and capacity to hold a workshop of some sort at The Gathering 2008.

Good news: Game Camp is showing up and will hold a full day at the Gathering 2008 with the focus on learning XNA. We'll get back to you within a day or two with more specifics. Keep watching the Game Camp news feed for updates. :)

I held a talk yesterday (28th of february 2008) a talk about XNA. The talk is pretty much what I held at Game Camp last year which was a revised version of what I had at NNUG Bergen in October last year.

Anywho, if you're interested in the material you can download it from this posts attachment.

The solution is a city in which you move around in with your Xbox gamepad or keyboard (arrow keys to move, A for flying up, Z for flying down, U for looking up and D for looking down).

Microsoft has announced that they will offer a preview release of XNA 3.0 in spring of 2008 timeframe with a final release scheduled for the 2008 holiday season.
XNA 3.0 will contain give the developers the ability to create content for Zune.

Read more over at the XNA teams blog.