Autodesk has official announced some of the new tools that will be available in their next major release 2010. New modeling tools, material explorers, new Mental Ray features, model validation tools, etc. There’s a great writeup of it all on CGSociety.
Randall Hand
Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.