<p>I've read a bunch of tutorials involving XNA (and it's various versions) and I still am a little confused on drawing primitives.  Everything seems to be really convoluted.</p>

<p>Can someone show me, using code, the simplest XNA implementation of drawing one or two lines on to the screen?  Perhaps with a brief explanation (including the boilerplate)?</p>

<p>I'm not a games programmer and I have little XNA experience.  My ultimate goal is to draw some lines onto the screen which I will eventually transform with rotations, etc (by hand).  However, for this first step.. I need to simply draw the lines!  I remember back in my ancient OpenGL days it was fairly straightforward when drawing a line with a few method calls.  Should I simply revert to using unmanaged directx calls?</p>

When working with XNA, everything (even 2d primitives) have to be expressed in a way that a 3d card can understand, which means that a line is just a set of vertices.
MSDN has a pretty good walkthrough here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb196414.aspx#ID2EEF
You'll find that it takes more code to render a primitive line than it would take to just setup a textured quad and rotate that, since in essence, your doing the same thing when rendering a line.