As I missed Josh's previous WPF competition, I'm thrilled to read he's started a brand new WPF Competition. Basically he's challenging us to create a swanky WPF-skin for his Podder application. The deadline is set to July 1st and Josh has even written a HOWTO Create a Podder skin, so getting started should be easy!

The Microsoft Surface Computer has been launched! Some AT&T stores in the US now have one of these babies installed; if you live over there you should check them out for sure! I'm looking forward to seeing a Surface somewhere in my vicinity, but I haven't found a European release date yet, so it may take a while, I guess.

...which explains the lack of updates. Hopefully I'll find some time to catch up this week!

As of today you can do the 70-502 exam in order to become a "Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): .NET Framework 3.5 Windows Presentation Foundation Applications". The only requirement is the 70-536 exam (.NET 2.0 Application Developer Foundation). Unfortunately the Self-Paced training kit hasn't been released, so studying the right stuff is still a bit tricky. The list of requirements is available in the Preparation Guide for Exam 70-502, but other then that and a possibility to subscirbe to a 3 day classroom-course there's nothing there.
For now the best thing would be to study the books of Adam Nahtan, Charles Petzold and Matthew MacDonald and reading a lot of MSDN, while epxerimenting on the side. I'm working on a poor man's self-paced training guide, but it will still take some time to finish. I hope to have it ready by the end of this week!

A couple of days ago I mentioned the Rock Memorabilia site, which utilizes the Deep Zoom functionality of Silverlight. Yesterday Microsoft posted a Introduction to Deep Zoom Silverlight Applications video on the Silverlight site.

In this introductory video, Dan Waters will show you how to build a deep zoom Silverlight 2 application in a short amount of time.

How cool is that?