A lot of developers are mistaking XAML to be an exclusively WPF technology. The truth is, that as it’s name (Extensible Application Markup Language) suggests, it can be used to represent all kinds of application mechanisms, not just the UI.
David Hill has written a post with a brief explanation as to why Acropolis uses XAML instead of code to represent its business logic component. Check the “Why XAML?” section under this post.

Two engineers from Microsoft Switzerland, Ronnie Saurenmann and Ruihua Jin, have put together this 90-page hands-on lab that takes you through the process of building a business application that has the same UI as Outlook 2007 using Expression Blend.
You can check out the xbap, read the hands-on-lab manual, or look at the source.

According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDnet, Microsoft preps a Windows-based kitchen client:

Among the features Microsoft is planning to make part of its forthcoming kitchen computing environment are a family calendar, recipe center, entertainment features and a shared bulletin board, sources added.

One of the developers in our team recently encountered a problem of getting the display name of the current user.
The .NET framework exposes the user name through Environment.UserName or System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name but there’s no API to get the user’s display name.
The simplest implementation to get the display name would be using DirectoryServices:

It seems there’s a lot of new stuff about Acropolis from TechEd:

• Acropolis documentation is now online

The video and audio recordings and the slides from the event are now available at https://www.sap.com/community/int/webcast/2007_04_Sapphire_US/index.epx?sessionid=166

Ian Tien, a senior product manager at Microsoft, opened a new blog about Duet titled “Unofficial Blog on Duet, Microsoft and SAP”.
Check it out at https://msftduet.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

I just got my Popfly invitation and created my first mashup – a Carousel displaying photos from my Flickr account (here’s a preview screenshot if you don’t have Silverlight installed).

We’re hiring a new architect for the Duet Enablement Group.
Duet is a groundbraking collaboration between SAP and Microsoft designed to revolutionize how Information Workers interact with enterprise applications.
We’ve released the first version last year and won the ComputerWorld Horizon award and it’s going to be even more exciting this year with the recent announcement of SAP and Microsoft extending their Duet partnership.

Today at Sapphire SAP & Microsoft announced the extended roadmap for Duet 2.0 and Duet 3.0.