In this piece, Karsten digs into some of the advanced features of Indigo, building the code to start from scratch on the client and server, then adding the code to add state management, reliability to the messages and asynchronous messaging.

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.

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.

Tom Barnaby has some tips for preparing today for Indigo tomorrow.

Dan Crevier from the Office team pines for WinFS when they were implementing Mac Office 2004.