WIN VISTA GADGET FOR LATEST XBLCG

The latest Creators Club Comuniqué is out, and with it there's a link to a fantastic Windows Vista Desktop Gadget that ...

"... shows games as they become available on the Xbox LIVE Community Games Channel on Xbox LIVE Marketplace ...".

After you download the gadget, it will list the five latest games that have recently hit the XBLCG channel marketplace:

But wait! There's more ... as soon as you hover your mouse on top of any of the games listed, a pop-up window appears showing more detailed info about the game, like: creator, genre and a brief textual description.

What if you want to find more about any of the games listed? Well, you just click on the name of the game and a new page is opened in your web browser with all the information available for that particular game on the XBox LIVE marketplace!

The gadget allows you to configure the feed, by either market or creator, as well as to set its refresh rate in minutes.

With this great desktop gadget now you can get up-to-date information of all the recent content changes on the XBLCG channel, effortlessly!

Enjoy!
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

ZIGGYWARE'S XNA ARTICLE CONTEST

The Spring '09 edition of XNA article contest at Ziggyware is here!

This year, among the usual prizes for the top-three articles, our friend Ziggy -thanks to the sponsors of the contest- is giving away licenses of the recently released Sunburn Lighting and Rendering Engine -from Synapse Gaming, a technology tailored for XNA Game Studio.

The contest has already started and the deadline is May 1st, 2009. So go ahead, start your engines, be creative and submit your articles!

Don't forget to read the rules of the contest.

Let's write on!
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

XNA GS 3.1 IS COMING NEXT

The cat is out of the bag, finally!

A new version of XNA Game Studio (3.1) has been announced -along with other relevant info like the next DBP compo- during this year's GDC.

No date has been published yet for its release, but in the meantime you can read the first quick notes about the new features that will be included in 3.1.

I guess in the next few days/weeks we'll see more official words with details on each topic.

In this sense, Shawn has recently blogged about one of these features: automatic serialization of content binaries (XNB). So, check it out!

See ya!
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.