The .NET 3.5 certification is on the way. Microsoft started doing beta exams november last year and today Dennis brought this to my attention (to be released at february 7.: [MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-502): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5—Windows Presentation Foundation. Pretty exiting since it means the real (i.e. non-beta) exams are in the air. There are 5 .NET 3.5 certifications announced:

Exam 70-502: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Presentation Foundation - 11/09/2007

Exam 70-503: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Communication Foundation - 11/08/2007

Exam 70-504: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Workflow - 11/15/2007

Exam 70-561: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - ADO.NET - 1/17/2008

Exam 70-562: TS: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - ASP.NET - 1/31/2008

Good news. Let's start learning :)

Last week I received Charles Petzold latest book '3D Programming For Windows. It is written as a follow-up on his first WPF book Applications = Code + Markup and focusses completely on the 3D API in WPF. I'm currently halfway through the book and find it well-written with plenty of good examples. It also got me very interested in WPF 3D.
Typing in vertices by hand, as is done in many of the examples in thwe book, is a terribly tedious business, but fortunately there are plenty of tools and plugins available to lighten this burden (see my previous two posts). WPF 3D is not hard, but you might want to brush up on your Vector and Matrix algebra since you need this to really understand some of the concepts.
What's more, I'll share this list of internet resources to get you started as well:

1.Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 3D Tutorial

2. Eric Sink has written a 12-days of WPF Blog series on WPF 3D

3. This is a nice article on Animation and Textures in WPF 3D

4. A video showing how to use Interactive 2D controls on WPF 3D Surface, something which has been made even easier in .NET 3.5

5. A large list of WPF 3d Performance considerations

As a follow-up to my previous post I thought I'd post some more XAML-exporters for different commercial packages.

3D Studio
I've found an online .3ds to XAML convertor which allows files up to 100k to be converted. It seems like a nice idea. I've dropped in a .3ds file I found somewhere and the tool produced well-enough looking XAML. I'll dabble some more with it this evening.

Maya 3d
There is a Maya to XAML converter available. I'm not a Maya user so I don't have any experience with it. Feel free to drop a comment if you have any experience with this tool

Lightwave
I haven't found any free or OS tools, but a company named Shaxam has released a Lightwave to XAML-plugin. hardly ever touched Lightwave, so I'm not able to tell you if it's any good, but here's a site you can read some more and get a link to a vid-tutorial.

AutoCAD
Allthough not a 3d-package per se, there are still a lot of folks who do model in Acad. There's a great DWG to XAML converter available at CodePlex. This one was the winner of MS's WPF Conversion Contest held in 2006! Be sure to check out that site, since it contains a lot of converters for a lot of different file formats (not only 3d ones).

I had hoped to find a converter for SketchUP as well, but was unable to. If someone knows of one, drop a comment!

I'll also add two 3d modellers designed specifically for XAML. You can off course use MS's Expression Blend, but there are alternatives as well. They do import some of the file formates mentioned above, so you could use them for conversion as well:

Aurora XAML Designer
Aurora is the still free beta of the commercial Aurora package.

ZAM3d
ZAM3d according to the site is

It provides developers and designers with a quick and easy solution for creating 3D interface elements for Microsoft Windows Vista based applications. It also acts as a 3ds to XAML and dxf to XAML converter.

This utility combines two favourites of mine: the amazing Blender open source 3d design suite and WPF3D. The script (written in Python) allows you to export Blender .blend files as XAML-models.

I've removed this image, cause it messed up the layout

It's written by Daniel Lehenbauer, Lead Developer responsible for WPF 3D. You can read some information about the script on his blog and download the script itself from its CodePlex page. I think I will start playing with it a bit this weekend so hopefully I can show some examples of my own next week.

Here's a short list of WPF blogs and sites you might find interesting. Most of them are updated regularly:
* The Blog of the WPF 3D-team, straight from the horses mouth!
* Tim Sheat's 'Musings of a Client Platform Technical Evangelist'
* Windows Presentation Foundation-3D Musings
* Perzond Bool Blog, by one of my favourite technical writers

Also, Tim Sheat (his blog is also in the list above) has a very extensive list of WPF-blogs (and Silverlight, Expression etc.) on his site, which you might want to check out. I'm not sure if all these blogs are still in use, but they might be worth checking out. What's more, you can download and OPML-file containing the links to all RSS-feeds, so you can import the entire list of 70+ blogs in one fell swoop into IE7... Talk about your productivity-killer :)