WCF Books

Learning WCF: A Hands-on Guide by Michele Leroux Bustamante
A good beginners guide to WCF.

Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy
Explains the architectural aspects of WCF and how it was engineered.

Essential Windows Communication Foundation (WCF): For .NET Framework 3.5 by Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, Chris Bowen
Good guide to the changes introduced by Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5

Inside Windows Communication Foundation by Justin Smith
This is a great reference to WCF internals. Advanced programmers only.

New from Microsoft Patterns and Practices

Microsoft p&p has recently released the following:

Enterprise Library 4.0 (VS 2008 support) – no public APIs have been changed from 3.1
Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) for VS 2008
Web Service Software Factory Modeling Edition (WSSF:ME) for VS2008
Unity 1.1 – a new Dependency Injection container based on the old DI AppBlock

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta

Here is Scott Guthrie's announcement.

The service packs are scheduled to RTM this summer.

I think the following are useful features:
- Faster application startup times
- .NET Framework Client Profile: only includes the client side libraries for a smaller download.
- ClickOnce improvements
- WPF Improvements
- The ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities (yay!)
- Astoria: a REST-based data service
- WCF improvements

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit

Microsoft has released a training kit for Visual Studio 2008.

Overview
The Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including: LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management.