2008r1 Awesome Stuff!

Here's my list of the awesome things I love about 2008r1, in no particular order:

• Introspection is rather neat. It's not the coolest thing ever, but it certainly has some nice functionality to it. For instance, I can now create COM interface producers with a little more ease by introspecting an object in order to do the vtable hookups. There are some other awesome things you can do with introspection as well, such as serializing an object in an automated fashion. However, until you're able to create an object by name, unserializing is still kind of painful.
• The ability to put anything into a variant, including arrays. Variants used to be handy, but now they down-right rock! This means you can store an array into a dictionary, for instance. So I can finally polish up a really nice preferences class interface!
• This is a little feature, but one I still really enjoy. I have a mouse with extra buttons on it for performing common actions like back and forward. I use these buttons constantly while browsing the web, as well as within Windows Explorer. The IDE used to ignore these buttons, but no longer! I can also use some of the extended keyboard buttons for functionality like search, cut/copy/paste, etc. Very minor, but still a really nice thing.
• A whole bunch of work was done to make Win32 functionality more Unicode-savvy, which is always great. Since RB only supports Win2k and higher, it's about time to see the last vestiges of ANSI support go away and be replaced with Unicode.
• Deprecations and removals! I know that may seem odd to be part of my "awesome stuff" list, but I strongly approve of deprecating functionality which would otherwise be ignored. This opens up the market to 3rd party developers who want to take over and provide that functionality, if it's necessary. It also removes cruft from the RB framework, which is always great.
• There's a new compiler feature that allows you to specify that a method implements a particular interface method explicitly. This is useful if you don't care for a particular interface's nomenclature. For instance, let's say an interface exposes a method called WriteError, but you really don't like that as it doesn't fit with your class' API. You can have the class implement a method called SpiffyError which Implements SomeInterface.WriteError instead. This may not seem too useful now, but it has connotations for the future that are very exciting.

What things do you really like about 2008r1? Any particular feature you absolutely adore? Any bug fix you were excited to see taken care of?