digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/06/03/may-posts-in-review.aspx'; May was an interesting month for me in several ways. One area that I struggled with though was blogging. Perhaps it is because the school year is winding down but I could not seem to stay on a roll. Still there were a couple of posts that received a lot of traffic. XNA was big because of the Zune announcement. And people seemed to be interested in projects for use in their classrooms. I have a long post about

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/22/new-developments-in-xna-resources.aspx'; Well the big announcement at the X NA Blog this week was the new community games option now available at XBOX Live. Well that and the new redesign and other extra added features of the XNA Creators Club site. It’s pretty interesting that premium members will now be able to create games, submit them for community review and then inclusion in XBOX Live Marketplace. But for me the best part was the

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/14/getting-started-tutorials-for-zune-game-development.aspx'; Well it hasn’t taken long for more people to jump on the XNA 3.0 Community Technical Preview that was announced last week . Sam Stoke s has a blog post showing the step by step that one needs to take to get the software installed and ready to run. He’s got a lot of screen captures to really make it clear what is going on. Dan Water s who has cranked out a number of previous helpful

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/07/xna-for-zune-game-development-now-in-beta.aspx'; The XNA team has announced that the Community Technical Preview of XNA GSE 3.0 is now available . The big news in this is that now it is possible to develop games for the Zune. So yes, now a handheld device that will play XNA based games. Check out the official announcement here for the details on what, where, when and how. Hey, just in time for something new for after the AP CS exam. :-)

Well there are always questions about an handheld game device from Microsoft. Well this isn't it. But what the XNA team did announce today is that XNA Game Studio 3.0 will support creating games for the Zune. And yes there will be multi-player games using the Zune's built in networking. Now that should be interesting. The announcement on the XNA blog is here . There is also a FAQ on the Creators Club web forum. Read the FAQ here . One thing of note is that your games will have access to non-DRM music