The combination of collinear factorization with effective field theory originally developed for soft interactions of heavy quarks provides the foundations of the theory of exclusive and semi-inclusive B decays. In this article I summarize some of the later conceptual developments of the so-called QCD factorization approach that make use of soft-collinear effective theory. Then I discuss the status and results of the calculation of the hard-scattering functions at the next order, and review very briefly some of the phenomenology, covering aspects of charmless, electroweak penguin and radiative (semi-leptonic) decays.
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