Haven't made much progress lately, but I did manage to implement normal mapping and true specular lighting using the Phong shading model for specular highlighting.  This does not use the Phong-Blinn utilizing the half vector for faster calculations, it uses the more accurate Phong model.

The Phong-Blinn makes assumptions that the viewer and light source are at infinite distances.  Getting in close to the cubes produced a far different specular image when I compared the two, and I wanted accuracy over getting a 3% performance improvement.  Besides, by the time I ever get something released, the GeForce 10000 will be out :)

Currently, I'm working on creating simple GUI controls in XNA such as buttons, labels, etc.

Hopefully will have something soon.

This image depicts about 3000 cubes rotating around the 'center' of the scene.  Currently getting 62FPS in debug mode... in Release, it's coming to about 120FPS so far. 

-Todd