First, I'm swamped in work. Then, I'm swamped in news. Finally, I’m swamped in sales, with the book at it's all-time low on Amazon.

I swear I only stopped reading blogs for a coupla days, but interesting news has just surged! For example, I just found out that MSDN has an entire web site dedicated to extending VS.NET. This includes the legendary VSIP and a set of extensions that lets you build VSIP packages in managed code. Very cool.

[via Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11]

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.

It’s well hidden, but Jason Olson points out that VS.NET Whidbey finally has a command shell built right in. Now if only it changed folders with my solution and support completion via the tab key, support F7 and F8…

Marc’s post made me connect VB's With statement for performing multiple operations on a single variable with XAML's terse, but powerful, syntax.

Jason Olson talks about dock, absolute and relative positioning in Avalon and shows XAML mark-up examples that make his points nicely.

Don Box talks about how Indigo services are hosted and how that interacts with IIS (or not, as the case may be).

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.