Xbox 360 Game Development Session at Tech-Ed 2007 Company: Microsoft Product: Xbox 360 Elite Each year, literally thousands of tech-savvy people from around the globe flock to a single conference to learn from experts and to collaborate with their peers. Developers and IT professionals alike will be attending Tech-Ed 2007. "Microsoft's premier annual conference for IT Pros and Developers is dedicated to providing technical training, information and resources to help you maximize your Microsoft investment." This includes hands-on workshops and expert-led classes on everything from cutting-edge server operating systems to Visual Studio and beyond. Last year, several Xbox 360s were given away as prizes for early registration, giving feedback on sessions and for participating in drawings at the vendor booths in the exhibitor hall. This year, it appears that it's safe to expect this again, but instead of standard white Xbox 360s, it looks like there will be new, black Xbox 360 Elites given away. Specifically, those who register prior to May 11th will be automatically entered to win an Xbox 360 Elite (or a $500 Gift card), according to the Tech-Ed 2007 website. With the introduction of the XNA game development platform and the Xbox 360 Developer's Club, it is possible for independent game developers and game development hobbyists to actually create games and run them on their Xbox 360s. This is likely to be of great interest to those who are already familiar with C# and the Microsoft software development tools, such as Visual Studio. To help encourage interest in developing games for Windows and the 360, as well as to help point those already interested in the right direction, David Weller, Community Evangelist for the XNA group, will be presenting a session (DEV344), entitled "Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express: Creating Your First Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 Game." Additionally, there is another session that deals with XNA: DEV08, entitled, "Build Custom Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio." This session talks about extending the Microsoft Visual Studio products. In fact, the XNA Game Studio was built in this manner. DEV344 - Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express: Creating Your First Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 Game Track: Developer Tools and Technologies Speaker: David Weller XNA Game Studio Express is designed to help you Free Your Game with managed code. In this 75-minute session, David "LetsKillDave" Weller gives a brief overview of XNA Game Studio Express, then dives right into a code-writing demo frenzy that has been called, "Incredible Fun!" and "One jam-packed hour of 'Amazing'!" by past attendees. Learn how to build your first Windows game and then deploy it to the Xbox. Join him in a journey that will leave you breathless, but technically charged up to be a great game developer! 08-TLC - Build Custom Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio Track: Developer Tools and Technologies Speakers: Douglas Hodges, Aaron Marten Visual Studio is not only a great set of development tools, but also an open and extensible platform for tools innovation. Extending Visual Studio can enhance your team's development effectiveness and may also open the doors to new business opportunities. Hundreds of ISVs have been successfully building products on the Visual Studio platform for years. Several Microsoft products such as XNA Game Studio and SQL Server Management Studio are also built on this proven platform. In this chalk talk, we show you how to build your own Visual Studio integrations, including tool windows, editors/designers, and new programming languages. We also show you some of the new extensibility features coming in Visual Studio codename "Orcas." See first-hand how to extend the market-leading development tool to make it more powerful than ever! It will be interesting to see if Xbox 360 development continues to gain interest in this and other non-gaming specific conferences. -Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins Related Links: Microsoft's Tech-Ed 2007 Website