Whether you’re new to Avalon with this Beta 1 RC release, or whether you’ve been working on an application since the very first PDC release of Avalon, you’ll hopefully find the following article a useful guide to the major feature areas and changes of this Beta 1 RC release. I wrote this article to appear on MSDN, and it’s currently just going through the pipeline to be propped up to the web. Since I know some people have been champing at the bit to explore this new release sooner rather than later, I’ve posted it online here as an interim measure.