[.net] Xna, .X loading

What do you want to do with it?

They are a text file, so you can just attach one to a stream reader of some sort and parse it out. The format is pretty simple. If you wanted to render it, you could load its constituent meshes into vertex buffers and render those. To get everything that might be in the file expressed, you'd end up duplicating the functions of a Model object.

I'm pretty green with XNA - I'm only just starting the switch from MDX. But as far as I can tell, there's no way to build a Model except through the content pipeline.

Thanks, that's totally shit :-(

You can always just invoke the content pipeline at runtime:
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2006/11/07/build-it-ahead-of-time.aspx

But that would ideally be for a tool of some sort, not a game.