This week was a big one in the WPF tools space, following the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (in Express, Standard and Pro editions for which you need to download the secure content downloader), the Silverlight tools for Visual Sudio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 August Preview (which features a number of new silverlight-specific features).
The Visual Studio 2008 cider designer is much improved from beta 1 - it remembers your settings for each file, crashes less often and is able to render your xaml files more frequently (if this sounds like faint praise - it is). It also has some nice xaml-editing improvements, such as the xaml-specific intellisense shown below, to help write those pesky CLR namespace to XML namespace mappings.