ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate
Yup, the RC is out, read about it here and here, then grab it here, and upgrade your projects by following directions.  Watch out for bugs though, apparently a few surprises made it in to this release.

MonetDB
Not really news, but I’ve been looking a bit at MonetDB.  It makes some pretty ambitious claims, and since it appears to have been built with information retrieval in mind, it might provide a more suitable storage mechanism than SQL Server for the system at my day job.