XNA Game Studio Express

I have to start of by saying I haven't written a really compelling game in a long time.  The last time I wrote a game was in 1997 in a competition with one of my buddies.  It was a chess game  He was going to write in C++ and I was going to write it in VB.  To this day, I've not seen Terry's C++ version. ;-)  I did it to prove you could with VB.

Anyway, I'm getting ready to do a series of academic events and we're going to be showing the XNA Game Studio Express beta.  All I can say is, "Wow!"  Game development is much easier these days, isn't it.

XNA Express is still missing a few key features from this beta, but I can't wait to see and use the final version.  Within just a few minutes, I was able to create a simple 3D world, a wireframe spaceship and fly around it it with the keyboard and an XBOX 360 controller.  Within a few more minutes, I had asteriods floating freely in 3D space and was able to do some collision detection.  I'm working on a nice 3D version of asteroids, in case you couldn't tell. ;-)  After I get the wireframe working, I'll try texture mapping.

Now, here's the kicker... I didn't know how to do any of this yesterday!  That's amazing!

So, what are you doing with XNA Express?  Care to share some of your code with us?

Bill