One of Microsoft’s most successful products in the past years has been the Xbox and Xbox 360. In the more recent years Microsoft has given us developers the chance to add our own creations to the 360 Indie Arcade with their powerful XNA framework. Using XNA, you can go from concept to finished game in literally days, and with a few more hours you can have it deployed to Indie Arcade. This is why SOTC has decided to tackle some of the concepts behind XNA, starting with the Content Pipeline.

XNA is quite possibly one of the most robust game programming frameworks out there. You can do nearly anything with it, and one of the reasons it is so flexible is its "Content Pipeline". But sometimes it can be a bit tricky to use this feature, requiring us to do bit more work. But in the end, it helps to use the Content Pipeline. Luckily today we are going over how to use it to load in some XML.

Remember that Game Studio software Microsoft released a while ago that let anyone develop games for the XBox 360? Believe it or not, they just released 3.0 beta that lets anyone write games for the Zune as well! This tutorial is going go through all of the software needed and then demonstrate how to create a simple 'Hello World' application that will run on your Zune device.

Microsoft has undoubtedly made some top notch developer tools over the years. Besides Visual Studio, .Net Languages, and the new Sliverlight, Microsoft has also jumped into gaming. We all know and love the Halo series, but what is slightly lesser known are the XNA code libraries. Microsoft has made some pretty sweet games, but with the still fresh XNA you have the chance to grab the reins and make your own games.