As a programmer I can understand code but I have little/no artistic talent. One of the key things we wanted to address with XNA Game Studio Express is making content a first class citizen in the IDE.

A lot of people today have two completely different systems when they build their game: one for code and one for content. Building content is a non-trivial task involving exporting, normalizing and processing content and then sequencing this with a relevant code build. We wanted to make this whole process simpler for enthusiasts so we have a pretty complete (and pluggable) cont