About a week ago, the XNA Team posted a blog entry about hosting an XNA Game Studio Express Launch Event. This comes in celebration of their v1.0 release today.
Having already attended a talk by Charles Cox, he did a good job of doing a five minute compressed demonstration of getting a 3D object rendering and responding to controller inputs. Unfortunately, throughout the night, there were technical difficulties with the microphone setup. All in all, it was a fun night. I had originally debated whether or not to attend another one of the Jon Pincus' Mashup Event (the first of which was quite engaging) or the launch. This proved to be a great opportunity to get fellow co-workers to take a peek at XNA. Aside from demos, one of the presenters highlighted Turbo Squid, a library full of 3D models and textures.
Unfortunately, due to work restrictions, I was not qualified to participate in the draws to win one of three Xbox 360s. Major Nelson (name - Larry Hryb) was calling out the winners. For Xbox advocates and podcast listeners, this guy is well known (his blog can be found here).
On the same day XNA released v1 of Game Studio Express, GarageGames, makers of Torque, made their Torque X available to the general public for download as an "Open Beta".