So one of the latest new developments coming out of Redmond for the last year has been XNA. XNA is a managed SDK for building games across our client product platforms. What is so exciting is that this will be revolutionary to the game development process and save lots of time spent on making throw-away mock-ups in flash or a related technology. One more addition to the "more, faster, cheaper" maxim that is pushing the software development process to maturation today. J

I digress, it's cool the way the XNA team is listening to the masses, amending their schedule a bit and pushing out another beta in response to high demand for an additional beta release. In Michael Klucher's own words,

"One thing that's worth mentioning is that, as you may know there isn't too much time between the second beta and the release this holiday. In fact you might think of this beta more as a final release candidate. This is your chance to help us identify any critical issues in the product that prevent you from using XNA Game Studio Express.".

Another interesting snippet from their blog is Joe Nalewabu answering why the SDK is in C# only,

We had numerous reasons for only supporting C# and C# Express in the first release, but some major ones were:

• C# as a programming language had the lowest barrier to entry for universities and specialty schools that are currently teaching dedicated game programming and design courses. Many professional game studios already use C# to develop some of their game production tools and students would be able to get some exposure to the language.
• The Express versions of Visual Studio are free, which allows as many people as possible to be able to get access to the base programming development tools.

So go grab yourself a copy of the XNA Game Studio Express SP1 Beta.