Last week Jeff Brand (Microsoft DPE), Rocky Lhotka and I sat down to discuss the good and bad of the Mix 08 conference.  You can get the podcast from Jeff Brand's blog.

You can find the Silverlight Beta 1 control demos here.  Including some controls we don't see in WPF like the DataGrid, Calendar and Hyperlink button.

Expression Blend is great for doing some things that are more complex in Visual Studio when authoring xaml... some of those things include Transformations and  Animations.  The Expression site has a entire area dedicated to helping people get up to speed on the Expression suite tools.

You can download the attached presentation on Defying Occasionally Connected Challenges with Smart Clients... it contains the deck... the demos for the Microsoft Sync Framework that I presented at the launch event are in the VS2008Launch.zip.  It does not include the demo on syncing Outlook Contacts with the File System, you can get that here.

Nerd + Art was one of the presentations at Mix 08 that was presented by Identify Mine.  It was to help the artiest release their inner nerd.  It was a group of 10 snippets that could be used in Visual Studio to help artists add certain capabilities to their working models / prototypes of WPF applications.  Those same snippets are also pretty helpful for someone getting up and going on WPF.

If your interested in REST you can hear some industry experts talk about it in a open discussion podcast over on Jeff Brand's blog.