What a fantastic event, Student Day (SD) attracted over 1200 students both from Universities and High Schools around NSW and some interstate. Student Day was the platform for the official launch of Microsoft Dreamspark and StudentstoBusiness (S2B) in Australia. If you haven't heard already, Dreamspark is a Microsoft student program designed to offer all tertiary students access to Microsoft’s designer and developer tools for FREE ! Dreamspark will also be rolled out to High Schools early next year.

The ground swell of interest in XNA Games Studio never ceases to amaze me - it's truly an underground phenomenon! Accordingly, there's never a shortage of materials produced by members of the community teaching you how to do things with XNA. A while back I posted a video of a great presentation that Luke Drumm delivered at UNSW - well, there's a perfect complementer to that video, in the form of Dan Waters's 12 part video tutorials on how to create an Xbox / PC game from scratch using XNA. Video:

Gamefest is probably the biggest game technology event on the Microsoft calendar. The 2007 conference hapened earlier this year (in the U.S, of course), and the presentations and some of the audio from speaker sessions have now been posted online for download. There's some very useful stuff here f you've been playing with XNA. The best thing is, the content's very 'accessible' - I've never been a games dev guy (I play games, and leave the hard part to the genii) and I can still understand alot of

OK, as many of you will know, 'Mix On Campus' is going down in Melbourne tomorrow from 10am to 4pm. Why would you know this? Because it's all that I've been harping on about of late (you can get more details here ). Anyway, amongst our esteemed guest presenters is Glenn Wilson , XNA / DirectX MVP and all round good guy (he took a day of personal leave just to present at Mix On Campus. Knowing how much developers can charge out these days, and knowing that Glenn has just forsaken such an amount to

I run Imagine Cup each year in Australia. It's (primarily) a software design competition, and is open to university students worldwide. The prizes are great, students get treated like rockstars and it's all a cracking good time. The following is from my Imagine Cup blog (all Imagine Cup news will be cross-posted to this blog) " First up, the biggest news is that anyone who wants to enter Imagine Cup 2008 are able to register now. Head to http://imaginecup.com/Registration/Default.aspx to sign up.

Luke Drumm's a great guy. And he's also a senior consultant for Readify , who just so happen to be one of the top .NET consultancies and training firms in Australia. Luke's also a game developer hobbyist, and has presented at Tech.Ed and Australian Code Camp on Microsoft XNA Games Studio . Luke Drumm, Luke Drumm, Luke Drumm. Before I sound too much like a stalker, I need to point out that my glowing intro of Luke is actually going somewhere Luke volunteered his very valuable time to show a group

Nick Hodge , Microsoft's Professional Geek (yes, that is his actual job title), recently interviewed Ross Brown and Penny Drennan from QUT about lessons learnt from the first ever semester of teaching the Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment degree . Forgetting for a minute some of the concerns raised about the sudden influx of students wishing to study gaming, I know there's a few other universities out there who are also in the same spot who this might be of interest to. You can view