I've been pretty silent about Paint.NET lately. Tom and I have been doing a bunch of code work on it, and Dennis Dietrich from Ireland has joined our cast (more about his very cool role in a bit). So here is a quick preview of what is coming for version 2.2:

• Performance. First, performance when zoomed-in on an image has been vastly improved. Second, scrolling performance has been dramatically improved. While the difference is stunning on our top of the line Dual Xeon and Athlon X2 workstations, it's even more of a saving grace on something like a 600mhz laptop. Version 2.2 should also maintain, if not improve, on v2.1's quick startup time.
• TGA file support. Do you play World of Warcraft? Well now we can load and save and manipulate all your cool screenshots. This file format is also popular in the game development community because of it its simplicity.
• File format plugin support. Do we not support a file type you want? Can you write C# code? If so, just write a plugin to handle the bitmap file format of your choice.
• Easy Updates. We do not have intrusive dialogs asking you to update. Instead, we place a green circle with an up-arrow as the first button in the main toolbar when we determine that a newer version is available. Click on it and you will be taken to a dialog with information about the update and a button labeled "Install." Click the button and the update will be downloaded, extracted, verified (we will be digitally signing v2.2 builds), and then installed. The goals for this feature were primarily to be unobtrusive, and to get more people to be running the latest version of Paint.NET. And also to not flood our servers with "is there a new version?" requests.

More at the link in the headline.