cheat-sheet to some of the WPF 3.5 SP1 features..

.NET 3.5 SP1 buzz peaked very early at the beta.  At the time I was immersed in Silverlight, so I am now having to catch up; which is a bit of work since the release is packed with lots of new features.  Below is my cheat sheet to date; I tried to group them on what I saw were the "core" investments.

The official release notes on 3.5 SP1 is at windowsclient.net/wpf.
Tim Sneath has a  great post that puts the enhancements into context both on size ( # of changes) and on impact ( based on customer feedback ) .

Deployment

Performance:

Graphics:

  • Adam Kinney interviewed David Teitlebaum around beta1 time-frame about the graphics improvements: hardware accelerated bitmap effects, D3DImage, WriteableBitmap, etc.
  • Greg Schecter has this great series on hardware accelerated bitmap effects.
  • Dr. WPF's tutorial on D3DImage is very comprehensive.  This is a niche feature but it does enable a lot of scenarios where the previous solution [with airspace] was not ideal.   BTW, happy blog-anniversary Dr. WPF!

AppModel:

  • Adam Kinney has a great interview with Jennifer Lee.   I must say I am a bit surprised there is not more out there XBAPs.  XBAP got a bad reputation at 3.0 launch because it did not work on Firefox, and at the time WCF required Full trust and XBAPs did not elevate. All of that has been fixed now, so I am excited about the improvements they did for XBAP in 3.5 SP1 (like the HTML splashscreen).
  • Lester's has a sample too on WebBrowser control [this is a very handy feature, compared to frame].

Tools/Other:

Data:

The list above is not all comprehensive, but it can help you catch up.  Please let me know what I missed [I am sure there is lots of that]...