This Game Developers Conference 2006 marked an exciting milestone for Microsoft XNA. All GDC attendees received a copy of the Microsoft® XNA™ Build March 2006 Community Technology Preview (CTP). This CTP marks the first public pre-release of XNA technology and provides game developers with a preview of what's to come, and an opportunity to deliver feedback to the XNA team which will shape future releases. Microsoft also unveiled a first look at the XNA Framework and showcased some exciting demonstrations based on early versions of the technology.

• XNA Overview Presentation March 2006

  XNA is a set of technologies Microsoft is building to help tame the costs and complexity associated with game development. This introductory session will provide an overview of XNA and describe how game studios will be able to use it to help manage their content creation and content builds.

• XNA Build Advanced Presentation March 2006

  XNA Build is Microsoft’s upcoming solution focused on game content pipelines and content builds. This presentation shows how XNA Build enables incremental content builds, dependency tracking, debugging and more. XNA Build can be customized to meet your unique requirements – whether you create a pipeline from scratch or adapt an existing one.

• XNA Build March 2006 CTP Tutorials

  These updated tutorials can be used with the March 2006 Community Technology Preview of XNA Build. Please note that the .ZIP file contains five walkthrough tutorials. The .WMV represents a separate walkthough you can run as well.

• Microsoft XNA Build March 2006 Community Technology Preview

  Microsoft® XNA™ Build is a tool which will help game studios manage the growing complexities of their game content builds. We invite you to install this pre-release into a non-production environment to learn more about how XNA Build will reduce development complexities.

  We have also re-released Microsoft MechCommander 2 under a Shared Source license as a sample you can use along with XNA Build. We suggest that you download the Microsoft MechCommander 2 Shared Source Release using the link below after you have installed the XNA Build March 2006 CTP to learn more about how XNA Build can be used to build a game.

  After you have evaluated this release, please share your feedback with us at the XNA Build Forums

• Microsoft MechCommander 2 Shared Source Release

  This is the Shared Source release for MechCommander 2. This release contains all of the source code an source assets required to build MechCommander 2. This release can be used with the Microsoft XNA Build March 2006 CTP.