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

• The Client profile SKU will be a very exciting offering soon. I will discuss it much more in a near-term post, but interim Troy Martez  has a good document introducing the client profile.   
• Justin Van Patten has a great post detailing which assemblies are included in client profile
• If you want to install it, the bootstrapper for it is at MS download center.
  

Performance:

• Jossef Goldberg has a great blog post of the performance improvements in 3.5 SP1. Must read!!
  There is a lot in there; and some are impressive and impactful (e.g. up to 40% cold-start improvement, container recycling, and virtualization on tree view).
• Vincent Sibal explains container recycling. This feature feels small but makes a big difference on large lists.
• Jossef also has a great example on using the new SplashScreen to improve perceived startup.
• Rudi Grobler touches on Scrolling perf improvements
• Jeremiah Morrill tries WriteableBitmap for video rendering. I am surprised i am not seeing WB for charting. I think that is a great scenario.
  

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:

• Adam recorded an interview with Mark Wilson Thomas and Erick Ellis.

Data:

• Lester Lobo touches on StringFormat. This is so incredibly handy!!
• Vincent Sibal on alternating rows in ItemsContainer.
• Vincent Sibal has a great explanation on BindingGroup validation (which you can use to validate an object based on multiple bindings sharing a datacontext).
• Vincent also has a couple posts on IEditableCollectionView, a feature that adds transactional support to editing items. 
• Write up on datagrid & control enhancements in 3.5 SP1

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]...