>I have been wanting to get a better handle on development using MVVM with WPF & Silverlight and trying to find good educational material. One book I have indicates using MVP but for the UI portion to use MVVM. What? That is confusing, then why have the M or VM?

Sounds a bit daft. What's the book?

>I saw what looks like a good book on this coming - "Pro WPF and Silverlight MVVM: Effective Application Development with Model-View_ViewModel" by Gary Hall (an Apress book) but it isn't scheduled to release until October.

Looks like that might be interesting......

>What or where is all the good stuff for learning the best practices to implement MVVM with WPF?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx for a good overview with example code. Beyond that there just seems to be a lot of 'bitty' examples on the web. I guess the good news is that if you write WPF apps with *no* code-behind for XAML pages/windows etc. and rely purely on databinding to the DataContext then you are, almost by definition, already using MVVM. AFAICS, the only bits missing from WPF are

(a) a delegate command structure that can work outside the WPF logical tree and
(b) a pattern to deal with messageboxes / modaldialogs

UPDATE: There's also this :http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/advanced-mvvm/

Best,
Viv