When you look at the features (LINQ) Microsoft is adding to C# 3.0 you would say hey! wait a minute, that is a rip off of Hibernate. I think not. Why? because the main goal of Hibernate is to give you persistent storage and a very SQL like way of accessing the database. While that is what you can do in C# 3.0 the similarities stop right there. In LINQ you can query collections irrespective of where that collection came from. It may have come from the database or an XML file, flat file or any other source (Active directory, in memory collection created by you, anything). Hibernate, as it works with databases needs XML files for configuration. LINQ does not as it does not care about the source. The other big difference is that LINQ is baked right into the framework so you can be sure when it gets released that all built in classes (all meaning the ones that you think should) will support LINQ.
More later ... (after I get flamed for this post 
)
If you are a good photographer chances are that you can be famous in this age of blogging and flickr. Hamad Darwish is an amateur photographer who has toyed with cameras for only about two years now. He shares a lot of his work with others on flickr and learns a lot in return. So how did he become famous? Microsoft paid him to take some good pictures and used a couple of his pictures as background for Vista. You can read the entire interview he gave to Long Zheng here.
Obviously you now have to wait for the next version of Windows 
to get a request which means you have around 2 years to learn, do some good photography and make yourself noticable 
. With all the money that Microsoft has it still chose to go with amatuer photographers for Vista backgrounds
Good to know that Microsoft also messes up bigtime! Microsoft started testing their Flash Killer code named WPF/e in December 2006. They added an expiry date in that build of mid February 2007. Apparently they thought it was Feb 23, but it timed out yesterday. Teams mostly put such expiry dates in the product to force them to keep releasing new builds. The WPF/e team has been testing the Feb CTP for a few days now and were planning to release it in the next two weeks, but when they saw the Dec CTP timeout, the entire team got into action and released the Feb CTP today . WOW! that was some mess up, but they came around pretty good.
Note: Microsoft has been beta testing with limited users their so called YouTube killer code named Soapbox for sometime now. The videos on soapbox is in Flash and word on the street is that they are working on converting it from Flash to WPF/e. That is one way to get WPF/e to the masses.
