The Game Developers Conference 2006 finished a couple of days ago, so some of you might have heard about this already. Microsoft announced a couple of interesting news at the GDC, among then XNA Studio, XNA Framework and XNA Build.

XNA Studio is a customized version of Visual Studio 2005 Team System aimed at game studios. It helps game studios manage the development process and “content pipeline” (getting all the sound, graphics, models, textures etc into the game).

XNA Build is a tool helping the studios to streamline the software build process, kinda Msbuild on steroids.

How ever, the most interesting announcement was the XNA Framework. This is a custom implementation of the .NET Framework that runs both on the PC and the Xbox 360. The framework contains a set of class libraries to help developers build games faster (and cheaper). By leveraging the XNA Framework cross platform development also become much easier. Basically what this mean is that you can write Xbox 360 games in C#. How cool is that?!  By making Xbox 360 game development accessible for smaller game publisher we’ll hopefully see more innovation and cool games coming out. This combined with the Xbox Live Marketplace distribution model opens up lots of new business opportunities for smaller game developers. Now we just have to hope that the rumors about 100$ Xbox 360 debug units are true… The XNA is available for download as a CTP.

Here are some of the information from the press conference where XNA was announced:

"We've been writing games for the last 15 years as monolithic, single-code bases that are growing unwieldy and complex," says Chris Butcher, lead developer at Bungie Studios. "C# on Xbox 360 lets us think about new modes of programming. It lets us get back to creating a game rather than wresting with code, while maintaining the real-time performance that we need."

Read the whole story over at Xbox.com.