For those of you who joined us at the Royal Festival Hall on 1st October and, especially for those who were otherwise engaged, please find below the session by Thore Graepel, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela and Ralf Herbrich on Microsoft Research Talk on CS Inside Halo 3 True Ranking System: If you are unable to view the above clip, please do let me know. Best wishes, Allison

We are excited to announce the impending release of XNA Games Studio 3.0 this summer giving (among other things) the ability for all XNA authors to publish games to Xbox Live Marketplace and in the process, to earn reputation, fame and even income. This represents a huge opportunity for your students. You can read all about this on the XNA Team Blog and also FAQ on the XNA forums . To compliment this new development we have opened out access to the XNA Creators' Club via DreamSpark . This new programme

Today I went up to Belfast with Vincent Vergonjeanne and Liam Cronin to present at QuMIX '07. Mike McMeekin , who is a Microsoft Student Partner at Queen's University Belfast did a fabulous job setting up the afternoon, so special thanks go to him and all of his hard work. The afternoon included a session on Imagine Cup by Liam. This included all of the information needed to get started for students interested in participating in the Imagine Cup for this year as well as lots of super giveaways! There

Today I went up to Belfast with Vincent Vergonjeanne and Liam Cronin to present at QuMIX '07. Mike McMeekin , who is a Microsoft Student Partner at Queen's University Belfast did a fabulous job setting up the afternoon, so special thanks go to him and all of his hard work. The afternoon included a session on Imagine Cup by Liam. This included all of the information needed to get started for students interested in participating in the Imagine Cup for this year as well as lots of super giveaways! There

Yesterday in Trinity College something landed. Something big. Something new and fun. Something that might keep me up late at night... The XNA European Tour began right here in Dublin, filling two 150-person lecture halls for the entire day with 300+ students and game developers. In fact we had been expecting half of that, but as registrations came pouring in, Steve Collins, a lecturer at Trinity, was able to put together an additional room and have the speakers do morning and afternoon sessions!

On Monday I went to Cork to visit students at UCC. Despite some technical difficulties involving scheduling and room changes, Microsoft Student Partners Nathan Forde and Sarah Fitzgerald managed to get together a great crowd! We spent about a half hour talking about Silverlight and its framework and then another half hour playing Pong and discussing building an XNA game. I had a couple of questions I promised I would post on my blog, so here they are: 1) What does the networking support look like

On Monday I went to Cork to visit students at UCC. Despite some technical difficulties involving scheduling and room changes, Microsoft Student Partners Nathan Forde and Sarah Fitzgerald managed to get together a great crowd! We spent about a half hour talking about Silverlight and its framework and then another half hour playing Pong and discussing building an XNA game. I had a couple of questions I promised I would post on my blog, so here they are: 1) What does the networking support look like