As mentioned on the XNA team blog and this XNA Creators Club forum post, the XNA team made a few announcements today at GDC 2009:

1.  XNA Game Studio 3.1

Later this year, an updated version of XNA Game Studio will be released.  It will contain the following features:

• Support for customized Avatars
• Support for Xbox LIVE Party features
• Video playback
• Updated audio APIs for “fire-and-forget” scenarios
• Support for XACT3
• Automatic XNB serialization
• XNA Framework multi-targeting in the Visual Studio 2008 and/or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition IDE
• Downloadable content for Xbox LIVE Arcade titles that use XNA Game Studio 3.1
• Consumer notifications when an Xbox LIVE Community Game that they have purchased has been updated

2.  Dream-Build-Play 2009 contest

The 3rd edition of Dream-Build-Play will start on April 6, 2009.  More information will be available at http://www.dreambuildplay.com soon.

3.  New Xbox 360 Development Kit and Test Kit hardware

You can check out images of the new Xbox 360 development and test kit hardware in the links at the bottom of the press page at http://creators.xna.com/press/gdc2009.

Here are a couple of links with additional information about the above announcements:

• GDC 2009 press information from the XNA team – includes links to more detailed press information about XNA Game Studio 3.1, Xbox LIVE Community Games, Kodu and new Xbox 360 development kits
• Gamasutra interview with Boyd Multerer, general manager of the XNA team at Microsoft – includes commentary about the new Xbox 360 development kits, XNA Game Studio 3.1, Xbox LIVE Community Games and Kodu

<update date="3/26/2009"> Added a link to Shawn Hargreaves' blog post about automatic XNB serialization. </update>

<update date="4/23/2009"> Added a link to Michael Klucher's blog post about video playback. </update>