Names Actions Sample
Michael Quandt posted a new sample a new sample on his site, showing how to "create named actions which support the GamePad, Keyboard and Mouse".
Go read his explanations and download it to see if it could be useful for your own games.
Light Pre Pass in XNA
Michael Quandt posted an interesting article on his blog about "light pre pass", a technique you can use for lighting in your XNA Game. The technique is closely related to deferred rendering, but with a twist to it: you don't store material information in the G-buffer, but instead use a render target containing lighting information (generated from the light pre-pass) in your material shaders. This has the advantage of a more flexible material system than classic deferred rendering, but it does mean that all geometry will need to be drawn twice.
Michael also promises more articles on this topic in the future, so this should be interesting to watch. You can go take a look at the article here.