I remember shortly after GameFest it was announced that the Live portion of XNA on Windows would not be included in the XNA Redist, only in the full XNA Game Studio download.  Yet, in the beta, I see that all of the Net namespace is right inside of the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll assembly, implying that it is in-fact in the redist.  Is this going to change for retail?  Or is the XNA Redist going to me missing dependencies like XnaLiveProxy.exe which will cause Live to fail?

The APIs are there, but the underlying functionality they depend on (such as the proxy) is not part of the redist.

This means you can distribute your game without having to build a special version against some other version of the framework assemblies, and if you wanted to support running both against a full GS install and the redist, you could dynamically check for initialization failures and just disable the networking menu option if that isn't available.

So Shawn what does this really mean…? As of right now only people who install GS 2.0 have access to networking features…? Is there some grand plan there I don’t know about because that seems kind of stupid. I mean even for testing proposes I can easily get 31 friends in a Lab, give them my game and try a large multiplayer test but to ask them to install visual studio and the XNA just isn’t going to work.

Please tell me there is some plan in place other than the current version of things.

Take Care,
Near

Yes, there is a plan. They've said that countless times before. That said it wouldn't matter if the underlying technology even was in the redist since all your test accounts would have to have XBL Silver (for system link; Gold for LIVE multiplayer) and Creator's Club anyway. So if asking them to install XNA Game Studio is a big worry, getting them to all pay $99-$149 is probably going to be more of a deal breaker. Networking is currently the same boat as Xbox 360 development: it's currently a developer's playground. Eventually the restriction will be lifted, but for now that's the way things are.

Edit: After re-reading this post on the XNA Team blog, PC to PC system link is totally free (too many stinking different scenarios :)). But the statement still remains that networking is a developer's area currently and not intended for XNA end-users at this time.