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With VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 just around the corner, the team has been starting to focus on what else we can do. The group focused on building activities has created a survey here, and would really appreciate any feedback you can give them about the dev, design, or usage of activities in your scenarios.
Again, the survey is here. 
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A pretty exciting project went up on Codeplex called Win32HostRenderer that "defies" the airspace rules of WPF. Quoting from the project, " Win32HostRenderer is a WPF control that will host a Win32 control and render it onto a WPF bitmap buffer allowing you to interact with the control and apply anchors and other sweet WPF trickery and magic. It works with 2D and 3D viewports." There is a warning associated with the project -- "The control is still highly in prototype mode and It doesn't really work perfectly just yet" -- but nonetheless it represents some exciting work that many may find useful. 
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WCF in the .NET Framework 3.5 includes simplified support for building services that adhere to the protocols of the web. To highlight these capabilities, we published Picture Services. Picture Services ( http://www.cloudsamples.net/pictureservices/) is a relatively simple sample that exposes pictures using the REST API in WCF. It represents a set of pictures as an ATOM or RSS feed, and provides access to single pictures using simple HTTP GETs. Pictures can come from a variety of sources including Windows Desktop Search, a folder on your computer, or Flickr. Check it out and enjoy... 
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 An updated version of the Information Card Deployment Guide is now available. Among other improvements, it’s been updated to employ the Information Card Icon. As the original deployment guide announcement said:
So you’ve decided to use Information Cards on your web site… Now what? I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just published a document giving step-by-step guidance to Web developers on what we believe are the best practices for doing this. The document walks Web site developers through two different deployment scenarios: sites exclusively using Information Cards for authentication, and mixed-mode sites allowing the use of either passwords or Information Cards. Examples are given for site sign-in, site sign-up, and handling lost Information Cards, including suggested confirmation text for each of these scenarios.
This link to the document Patterns for Supporting Information Cards at Web Sites: Personal Cards for Sign up and Signing In references the current version and will be updated to point to any future revisions as well. The Sample Information Card Site employs these guidelines and is built using the Information Card Relying Party Resources announced earlier. Enjoy adding Information Card support to your web sites! 
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Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" and the .NET Framework Beta 2 are now available for download. Included in this release of the .NET Framework is enhanced WCF support for web programming (REST), syndication, JSON messaging, and intergration with workflow foundation. 
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This past Friday we released Beta 2 of Visual Studio that contains the .NET Framework 3.5. Get it here. This releases stabilizes a lot of the stuff which had been in the previous releases, and includes some of the new tools, like the WCF test client. The main feature relating to WF is the introduction of the Workflow Services project templates which contain a complete, working implmentation of a WCF service as a WF workflow using the new send and receive activities. 
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Are you using the UI Automation APIs? If so, the WPF team would love to talk to you! In particular, we are interested in companies who have written testing tools (or are thinking of writing testing tools) that exercise these APIs. Please email annegao@microsoft if so. 
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Kevin Moore, a program manager on the WPF team, has prototype code for making the process of installing the .NET framework 3.0 on to XP a much smoother experience. He's looking for beta testers. 
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 We now have available an icon that everyone can use to indicate that their web site or application supports information cards.
The idea is that the icon will become readily recognized by users in the same way that the RSS icon is.
The icon can be found here, guidelines here and an FAQ here. 
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Check out this new end-to-end MSDN Hands-On Lab that will take you through the paces to the next level of Windows UI development. Harnessing the power of WPF (.NET 3.0, Expression Blend, and Visual Studio 2005) you learn how build a replica of the Outlook 2007 UI in just a couple of hours! You can download source code and the lab manual. 
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A new version of the WPF Performance tools (wpfperf.exe) has been posted both x86 and x64. This new build has both user interface enhancements and resolves some of the stability problems that the earlier version suffered from. If you are a WPF developer and aren't using these tools, download immediately! If you are using the existing tool, the recommendation is to move to the new version of the tools. 
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Vertigo software has written a fantastic WPF reference application called Family.Show. You can run the app and download the source. It is a great sample:
- It's realistic because there are shrink-wrapped applications for sale today that offer similar functionality;
- It's applicable because it's a data-centric scenario, because the idea of a hierarchical tree is pervasive in many business scenarios (CRM and HR to name just two), it covers data visualization (also a key requirement for many modern business applications), and because it has a well thought out model that keeps data and presentation separate.
- It covers many feature areas: data binding, styling and templates, animation, XML serialization, resources, rich text editing, image manipulation, Windows Vista integration and XPS output.
- It's interesting: everyone has a family story to tell
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