catching up on all the blog posts and announcements from the holiday break..

First of all, best wishes for your 2009.  
I am a bit late to with the good wishes, and even later with posts that happened during the holiday break, but I still wanted to make sure you did not miss these:

• Adam Kinney released the XAML Guidelines Part 2 video, this part is an interview with Unnir, a PM in the Blend team. In the interview, Unni first opened Blend inside Blend (that is how they design it) and then he walked in detail through how Blend is organized and hinted a bit on how their developers incorporate assets from their designers.    
  
• The WPF team released Photosuru, a rich client photo viewing experience.  
  Photosuru started as an internal showcase and harness for 3.5 SP1 features (e.g. Bitmap Effects, perf improvements, client profile deployment,etc. ).  Along the way, as Photosuru grew and the user experience improved, it has turned into really good and comprehensive WPF sample (including features like layout, styling, skinning, etc.)
  The application was released with source code so I highly recommend that any one learning WPF download it and check it out..    Adam has a video walkthrough of the app of the app w/ Nic Armstrong.
  
• Windows Live Mesh won the “Crunchies Best Technology Innovation/Achievement” award.   Congratulations to the Mesh team!!   If you are not a mesh user now, I hope the fact that this is a ‘community driven’ recognition encourages you to try it out.
  
• Win 7 beta1 was released last week.  This is by far the best OS beta1 I have ever ran,  I am running it for my day job on my main computer (mostly because I feel it runs better than Vista already) and it has a few new features that I find handy (like the new snipping tool).  
  If you are a Win7 developer, check out the videos that our colleague Yochay is creating..  Keep an eye on his blog since he has a long list of developer videos he will be releasing.  Windows 7 has developers features that can really boost end-user productivity (like jump lists, taskbar, etc.) so it is a great opportunity for ISVs to differentiate their app with minor work tweaks. 
  
• Karl announced that he and I will be doing an all-day training on Model View View-Model end of the month in Cupertino, CA..  If you are in the area, please stop by.  We have been doing a lot of M-V-VM thinking lately and hope to share good stuff..   Also, if you are an m-v-vm practitioner or apprentice, please let us know what you want us to cover. We have an agenda already,  will try to get it posted early enough for feedback..  

That gets me all caught up.. Apologies if it is all dupes..