  We discuss exclusive charmless B decays within the Standard Model of particle
physics. In particular, we consider hadronic two-body decays as B -> pi pi and
perform a conceptual analysis of heavy-to-light form factors which encode the
strong interaction effects in semi-leptonic decays as B -> pi l nu. Concerning
the hadronic decays we compute NNLO QCD corrections which are particularly
important with respect to strong interaction phases and hence direct CP
asymmetries. We present results for the imaginary part of the topological tree
amplitudes and a partial calculation of the real part of the amplitudes which
is technically more involved. In our conceptual analysis of the QCD dynamics in
heavy-to-light transitions we consider form factors between non-relativistic
bound states. We perform a NLO analysis and compute the so-called soft-overlap
contribution which is calculable in our set-up. As a byproduct of our analysis,
we calculate leading-twist light-cone distribution amplitudes for
non-relativistic bound states which can be applied for B_c or eta_c mesons.
