It's great to know that WPF is continually being updated and improved, as I personally believe it is a really forward-looking technology. I really hope the new WPF Yahoo messenger actually comes out sometime soon, as, for me, it seems like the first mass audience consumer level WPF app.
On a technical side, I remember seeing, around PDC '06 time, a series of slides stating that WPF would work via DX10 (where possible in hardware) to fully move the text-rendering path into hardware. This means that glyph performance would be up there with GDI, if not even faster. It also meant better GPU task allocation thanks to the advanced scheduling features of DX10-class GPUs. Is DX10 support for the presentation backend coming in this 3.5 release? If not, is it planned to come sometime in the future?
I'd be a real shame to see WPF fall into the same trap that GDI Acceleration did, of being very good at what it was, but locked to a very specific set of basic hardware functionality that went out of date around '98, and was never extended, perhaps with the exception of hardware alpha transparency in Windows 2000.
