XNA Game Studio Express is out

I've never been a big video game player.  Well, 'never' is probably not the right word.  You see, Doom & X-Wing caused an addiction that briefly "interrupted" my college education at one point, forcing me to quit cold turkey.  I've never looked back or played many games since then with the exception of an occasional Unreal tournament frag session at company meetings.  So maybe that's why I'm a little slow with the news around things like this...  

Via Thom and Andrew, the XNA Game Studio Express beta is out.  

Are you a developer?  Do you like playing video games?  Have you ever dreamed about developing video games?!  Now you can make those dreams a reality with XNA!

What is XNA?  XNA is Not an Acronym!  XNA is a developer toolkit that allows you to develop games for the XBox 360 and the Windows platform.

The current free beta only has support for developing Windows games.  However, when the final release comes out, you will be able to purchase an XNA Creators Club subscription to build games for the 360.  That's right, soon you will be able to go and build your own XBox 360 games!

Note: XNA Game Studio Express requires Visual C# Express Edition to be installed.  Both Visual C# Express & XNA Game Studio Express can be installed side-by-side with other Visual Studio 2005 SKUs.

Go get the bits here:

https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e979e3-b8ae-4ea6-8e65-393ea7684d6c&displaylang=en