Pseudo

He said that you can sign up and the next day get it...this isn't exactly the case.  I signed up and got access a few months later.  It's well worth it though, a VERY interesting product.  It still has a few problems with perf (serializing as XML), and consistancy ("dir | get-member" returns members of the items IN the array, not OF the array), but nothing that wont get resolved.

He's not kidding about how easy it is to use compared to UNIX shells, and even more powerful IMO.

I think the subject line should reflect what the dude actually says rather than the original question.  The last two guys said some interesting stuff, but they both had little to say about the question.

so umm...did I miss the answer to the question?

From a graphics enthusiast perspective, Avalon sounds like a dream.  I think many people have misconceptions about just what exactly it is however.  As I understand it, Avalon is much more like a retained mode, highly hardware accelerated, and fully scalable version of GDI+ than it is like a 3D API.  This is obviously a good thing because the average GUI developer doesn't want to worry about the details of a 3D system, they just want the blending, transforming, and smooth animation that 3D graphic accelerators can provide when used for 2D graphics.

Also, I haven't heard many people considering a new drawing model a way to take over the web, but I have heard people considering XAML in this way.  You can't blame them because as I see it XAML + Indigo + ClickOnce seems to solve all the problems I commonly run into working with DHTML + server side scripting; so I wish it WOULD take over the Web.  Although that will obviously not happen because Avalon only runs on Longhorn. 

I think it would be good if Channel 9 did an interview with someone from the XAML team so they can clear up the fact that XAML is not just for doing graphics.  I think there are a lot of advantages to moving much of your code into a declarative form such as XAML for maintainability reasons.