The most concise description of what I love most about Monad, the next-gen Windows command line, comes from Jeffrey Snover, a Microsoft Architect, in a Peter Coffee article:
“We keep the idea of ‘A pipe to B pipe to C,’ but we pass .NET objects instead of structured text. We can pass ADO, other kinds of objects, and we can create reflection-based utilities.”
Just the idea of not having to deal with ambiguous from standard input or reparse the data at every stage of the shell pipeline makes me giddy with anticipation.
Adam has a nice, concise sample of property triggers in Avalon, which are a XAML way to change the properties of an object based on an action, e.g. implementing rollover. He also shows a small example of using property triggers with animations to build pleasing transitions.
I want all of the MS conference rooms to be like this one so that they can broadcast high quality audio and video to me at my house. I especially want a RingCam.