Microsoft decided to open up the console game industry in a revolutionary way: up until now we've been struggling with all kinds of hacked, cracked and half decent SDK's to produce Indie games[1] for the consoles but now Microsoft announced a Express (free!) version of XNA[2].
Anyone will be able to write a game for the XBox (and Windows XP at the same time)
Unfortunately this means the end of Managed DirectX 2.0 so until the release of XNA I'll keep on going with Managed DirectX 1.1
[1] Indie games
[2] XNA Game Studio