High End Performance Optimizations on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7
Ian Nicolades
Technical Director, UberGeekGames
For the Xbox or Windows Phone 7 programmer, performance is something that should always be kept in mind. For any moderately complex game, it can be very easy for framerate issues to crop up, and seeing as those pesky gamers insist on having a smooth playing experience, it can quickly become problematic.
Having had quite a bit of experience in this area with our last few games, this article will be a “missing manual” of sorts; the kind of cheat sheet that would have saved me more than one headache! 
Performance Tools: PerfHUD
Matt "Perf Analyzer" Pettineo has a new post about analyzing Direct3D performance using NVIDIA PerfHUD, where he goes into great deal about each feature of the tool. Read all about it on his blog.
Performance Testing, Gesture Recognition and Template Exporter
Kris Steele talks about his experience with performance testing while developing his XNA Game.
The new version of FGF (0.1.2.0) was released, and contains Gesture Recognition capabilities. Read all about them on John Sedlak's site.
Stephen Styrchak posted the source code to his Template Exporter on codeplex, and then posted an explanation about what StartupObject is and how it should be handled when exporting project templates.
Scrolls from the Past: PIX
Good evening everyone,
After a long and tiresome day, I come to you now, at sundown, to put some things in writing. Looking through the old, dusty and crumbling archives I managed to collect some scrolls about a very very interesting and useful ritual by the name of PIX. My memories of what PIX stands for are not too fresh (maybe it's yesterday's feast, or maybe not...), but for now I'll just assume it comes from Pictorum Informatias eXtractorum. If you think this is uses to carefully inspect elements of images and artworks created with XNA and that other API (Apparatus Procesarum Imaginus ?) called DirectX, like you would do with a clear and carefully crafted magnification glass, then you would be correct.
The first instructions to use PIX in XNA were laid out by the now familiar XNA sorcerer Manders, in his scroll about a "painless" introduction to PIX, way back in the first year of XNA. Then, two moon later, the grand master wizard Shawn incited our collective minds, by decreeing that PIX is "it is just like totally awesome, dude, and you should definitely try it", but not going into more details about it.
No matter... no matter... This only proved to be a slight delay, because a dozen moons later, Brian son of Richard of the GarageGames clan wrote a detailed and clear chronicle about how he used PIX to get some insects out of some pixels (I don't know why they use words like debug, when this sounds so much better).
In another one of his Scrolls of XNA Recommendations, bittermanandy talked about PIX and why you should use it.
Next, in the spring of this year the great clan and spell-weavers at Microsoft sent one of their own to the Gaamus Developerus Conferentius, to spread word to the whole world about the ritual I cover in this pages. All that he said was recorder for eternity, together with his drawings.
Lastly, XNA wizard MJP of the Mostus Valuabilus Profesionalus kind wrote a long long long parchment where in great detail, the invocation and usage of PIX was described.
And in the end, I dicovered a cache of scrolls in the MSDN library with a great number of tutorials about PIX.
My eyes are getting weary now, but I will not leave before I tell you what we will look at nex... (zzzzzz, snore, zzzzz..).....