Welcome !

Thank you for landing on this portal. The focus of this portal is going to be around bringing you high quality resources around XNA, in the form of tutorials, articles, samples, starter kits etc.
XNA Game Studio Express is available to download from: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937795.aspx

The best place to start with XNA is by reading What is the XNA Framework on the official XNA Blog.Moving onto what this portal will offer and how this will differ from the 100 other sites that are inevitably going to mushroom around XNA, the focus of this space is to provide a very strong foundation on which to base your XNA programming adventures. We won't just be looking at how to modify 1 or 2 lines of code in the starter kits. We will be talking about the foundations of the technology, get a deep understanding of the underpinnings of XNA.

In short, this will be the next best thing to taking a Computer Science course in Graphics using XNA, only that you won't have a deadline to submit homework and won't have to shell out $3000.

Without any further ado, here is the core "syllabus":
1. Introduction to XNA [What is XNA, Value Proposition, XBOX 360 Architecture, Market Size etc.]
2. Timing in XNA [How to get a FPS (Frames per Second) counter]
3. XInput [How to use your 360 controller in your game]
4. 2D Graphics and Animation using XNA
5. Introduction to 3D [Math & Concepts]
6. Introduction to 3D [XNA 3D Rendering Pipeline]
7. Drawing 3D in XNA [Primitives]
8. Drawing 3D in XNA [More Primitives & Buffers]
9. Shaders [Introduction (No fixed function pipeline support in the XBOX360)]
10. Vertex Shaders
11. Pixel Shaders
12. Effects
13. Color
14. Lights
15. Textures
16. Meshes
17. Advanced Meshes
18. 3D Animation [Bone]
19. 3D Animation [Skinned]
20. Advanced Features [TBD]

Obviously, the above is not cast in stone and we will treat the above as a working guideline - a lot of what we do in subsequent sessions will directly be based on your feedback.

This is a long journey that begins assuming no knowledge of Graphics development and culminates in a level of sophistication required to author an engine [where the knowledge required is pretty significant!] At all stages however, the content at each step will build on the previous ones and hopefully, you should never feel "lost" or "adrift".

Anyway, we are getting ahead of ourselves here. So, having shared my "vision" for this portal, I hope that together, we are able to fulfill this mission and have fun doing so.