Quote: "i mean it can be modified to run homebrew code, as for the sdk... well ill find it somewhere (limewire,kazaa,you name it), no wait, i know someone who has gotten a hold of it, never mind."
Yeah okay, try finding the 360 SDK anywhere :-P And a modded Xbox is a hell of a lot different than a development console. They are not the same thing. You can't hook up your modded Xbox to Visual Studio .NET and compile straight across the the Xbox.
Quote: "Developing for consoles is a dream. I dabbled in GBA dev for a few months, and was totally surprised at how relatively easy it was to program for it, despite the rather limited resources. I would imagine developing for something like the 360 would be amazing, especially with the dev kits backed by an entire multi-billion-dollar corporation and not just by a small user-run community."
I agree. I'm working on a GBA port right now and it's amazing. And for my real job I'm working on an Xbox 360 game. There are so many examples on the dev kit (although many are ported from the original Xbox XDK).
The difficulty is in the multi-threaded architecture. It is incredibly difficult working with threading architecture when you have to worry about synchronization issues. And my particular section is A.I., which is running on the same thread as physics because it needs to raycast, so if I perform too many raycasts in a tick then the rest of the system doesn't know to wait. Therefore if, say, an object is destroyed from another thread, after I raycasted to it in my thread, and I try and access that memory location again, I will get junk data and the game will most likely crash.
However, if you can beef up your framework to handle most cases, which we have done, and really take advantage of the horsepower, then you can work wonders.