Dax and I have been talking on revolUXions about the magic of WPF/E Silverlight for awhile now. The recent announcements have really made my head spin. Dax and I needed time to digest all the information before we recorded the next show!
What holds the most promise for me is the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). We've been experiencing a ton of scalability problems with our JavaScript framework (once the visualizations gets thousands of data points), so the promise of 1000x increase in performance using C# over JavaScript is enticing. Expect to see some benchmarks from me, because this is certainly a pain point for us.
I've been doing a bit of Ruby work lately. Everyone should lean a new language every so often (and no, learning VB.Net after you've programmed C# doesn't count). At first I was lovin' me some rails, but I've since grown enamored with the language itself. I love the DRY principle (don't repeat yourself), the convention of only declaring and defining things once, and I both love and hate duck typing (I love it when it works, I hate it when it doesn't).
The thing I hate the most, though, is the lack of a real IDE, and the lack of a compiler. These problems will both be solved by the integration of Dynamic languages in Silverlight. I can't wait to try IronRuby!
Below is a diagram I found that gives an overview of the platform vision.
