The new and already great LearnXNA, a community-run Microsoft XNA source for tutorials, news and more regarding MS’s newest approach to gaming has a great tutorial and video how-to on creating your own Pong clone using the XNA framework, including everything from presentations to video documentation. It will take months before we start seeing what XNA is really capable, but for now it’s great to see the interest growing and seeing more exmaples of what we can hopefully expect from small XNA homebrewers.

Read more: LearnXNA | Pong video tutorial | XNA @ Microsoft

The indie gaming world was abuzz after Microsoft announced it’s independent and student game development tool, XNA Game Studio Express, allowing aspiring game creators the ability to begin developing their own games for Windows XP and Vista at no charge. The most exciting bit of news from that announcement was the ability for game creators to develop for the Xbox 360 console starting this holiday season 2006 as part of what MS are calling the XNA Creators Club. This will be a subscription-based service, requiring a yearly subscription of $99, a low fee for any student or bedroom coder who wants to see their creation running on an Xbox 360. To follow that up today, Microsoft has announced the beta release of XNA Game Studio Express for Windows XP and Vista, leading up to the final release at the end of this year with XNA Game Studio Professional launching Spring 2007. Coinciding with today’s beta release, GarageGames has announced the enrollment program for their Torque X beta program, which will include both the Torque Game Builder engine and the Torque Shader Engine, which were developed in conjunction with XNA Game Studio Express.

Read more: Microsoft releases Game Studio Express beta | Garage Games