Winforms Developers Rejoice! Silverlight Developers Rejoice.. The next version of WPF is here, and there is now NO REASON not to use WPF instead of Winforms, and Silverlight 2.0 developers can rejoice because WPF has attained parity with Silverlight controls and capabilities.

From Fai's Blog: "Microsoft has released the beta of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework SP1. Each of these releases contains a significant amount of new functionality and bug fixes for developers which will further enhance their experiences with our products.  However, this release is focused on new functionality specifically in .NET Framework SP1 and Visual Studio SP1 for Client development. 

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for WPF development. This release includes numerous bug fixes and the following feature areas:

· New and improved graphics capabilities for both 2D and 3D, including direct X and HLSL support..

· New controls and extensibility

· Performance improvements for startup and runtime, as well as streamlined setup

· Interop with HTML (DOM) as well as DirectX

As part of the streamlined setup we are introducing a new .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile which is a perfect subset of the .NET Framework 3.5 targeted exclusively at client applications and clients scenarios. The Client Profile will work with ClickOnce application deployments.

The beta is intended as a mechanism to allow early testing and feedback. As a beta release, it is recommended that you only install the service pack on test machines (VPCs would be great for that purpose).  Note that there are a few known incompatibilities with this service pack including: Expression Blend, the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK, and the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008. A new version of Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview has been released here that is compatible with this service pack.  These issues will be resolved for the final release, but it is important that you start testing your apps for compatibility and provide feedback.

• Windows Presentation Foundation Forum for feedback and questions regarding this release of WPF.
• Visual Studio WPF Designer Forum for feedback and questions related to WPF features in Visual Studio 2008.
• Expression Studio Forum for questions and discussions related to WPF features in Expression Blend. "

 The most exciting part of this release is Microsoft has brought parity between user controls in WPF and Silverlight, and supports a number of controls not present in WPF including the much requested DataGrid control, and a WPF based HTML browser control, that even supports Silverlight embedding. One of the exciting things that I was looking for is "Virtualization" in controls such as the listbox, treeview and datagrid. This has been a peformance issue if you try to databind and populate with lots of data. This problem seems to be completely gone..

I will have several tutorials published this week about working with the new controls.. The new browser control and it's capabilities are just amazing.. This  release truly will bring the entire "write once deploy many" promise of WPF, WPF/E (Silverlight) to reality..

For more in-depth information check out Tim Sneath's blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2008/05/12/introducing-the-third-major-release-of-windows-presentation-foundation.aspx, and thanks to FAI and his BLOG for initial information.