Yesterday the WPF team shipped some major horsepower features in the vastly understated preview Service Pack to .NET Framework 3.5. It is an exception to the rule for an SP release to have features, and not just bug fixes. In the mold of Windows XP SP2, this SP of .NET Framework 3.5 is chock full of new WPF features. For the first time the .NET Framework has been divided into a Client profile which - intuitively - does not contain server specific libraries such as ASP.NET. This cuts down the size of the .NET Framework to about 25MB (which as Dr. Sneath reminds us is close to Adobe Reader's size) and people like me with a Java background can associate it loosely with the Java SE and Java EE split. In many ways, this is the realization of the Longhorn-era "WinFX" give-or-take a couple assemblies. Given my previous association with the WPF Application Model, I'll begin with a shout out to improvements from and driven by that crew. The Web Browser control in WPF is embodied by the
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