As noted on the XNA Game Studio team blog and this App Hub news item, the deadline for submitting Xbox LIVE Indie Games created with XNA Game Studio 3.1 to play-testing or peer review is only one week away.  Here are the key things to keep in mind:

• Starting at 12am PST on February 8, 2011, you will no longer be able to submit Xbox LIVE Indie Games created with XNA Game Studio 3.1 for play-testing or peer review, and instead you must use XNA Game Studio 4.0.  This includes updates to previously published games.
  
• If your game is in peer review by 12am PST on February 8, 2011, it will be allowed to complete the peer review process.  If it passes peer review, it will be published to the Xbox LIVE Indie Games marketplace.  If it fails peer review, you will have to upgrade it to XNA Game Studio 4.0 before you will be able to re-submit it.
  
• If you have previously published an XNA Game Studio 3.0 or 3.1 game to the Xbox LIVE Indie Games marketplace, it will continue to work correctly.  You do not have to upgrade it to XNA Game Studio 4.0 unless you plan to release an update after 12am PST on February 8, 2011.
  
• You can still deploy and debug XNA Game Studio 3.1 games on your Xbox 360 console using XNA Game Studio Connect after 12am PST on February 8, 2011.  This deadline only impacts 3.1 games that you plan to submit for play-testing or peer review.

Rob Mensching announced on his blog yesterday that the build that is likely to be the final build of WiX v3.5 is now available to download.  The v3.5.2519 build contains a couple of targeted fixes for bugs reported since the 2nd escrow build was declared in December, and it will be the final build of WiX v3.5 if no ship-stopping bugs are found.

If you are using WiX to create Windows Installer packages for your products, I strongly encourage you to upgrade to this build of WiX v3.5 and help the WiX virtual team validate that this build is ready to be declared the final WiX v3.5 build.  Here are a couple of links to help get you started:

• Download location for the WiX v3.5 final build candidate (v3.5.2519) - http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.5.2519.0/
• WiX bug reporting site - http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105970&atid=642714
• WiX discussion lists - http://wix.sourceforge.net/mailinglists.html#wix-users

I’m a little late posting this information since the book was released at the end of December, 2010, but my co-workers Tom Miller and Dean Johnson wrote a book titled XNA Game Studio 4.0 Programming: Developing for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360, and one of my other co-workers, Shawn Hargreaves, wrote the foreword for the book.

You can find more information about the book at the following locations:

• Visit the book’s Facebook page
• Read reviews and order the book on Amazon.com, including a Kindle version

I got a copy of this book last week, and now I need to remember to go find Tom, Dean and Shawn and get them to autograph it.

XNA Game Studio 4.0 and the XNA Framework 4.0 introduced several breaking API changes.  They are described at a high-level in the documentation and some of them are described in more detail on Shawn Hargreaves’ blog.  These breaking changes present challenges to developers when they try to upgrade their games from XNA Game Studio 3.0 or 3.1 to 4.0.  XNA Game Studio 4.0 includes a built-in upgrade wizard that will upgrade 3.0 and 3.1 projects to 4.0, but the upgrade process only updates meta-data in the project files (such as .csproj and .contentproj).  Like the upgrade wizards for other Visual Studio project types, it does not attempt to make any changes to the code in the projects.  This is because it can be difficult to reliably tell what the intent is of a given piece of code, and in many cases there are multiple options that could be valid solutions for breaking changes.

Fortunately, someone recently posted a cheat sheet with more details to help map compile errors that can occur after upgrading a 3.0 or 3.1 game to 4.0 to the options that you have to update your code so it will compile successfully with 4.0.  If you are running into any issues fixing your game to react to breaking changes in XNA Game Studio 4.0, I encourage you to take a look at the cheat sheet at http://www.nelxon.com/blog/xna-3-1-to-xna-4-0-cheatsheet/.