February's MSDN Magazine has a great article on console applications in .NET, and presents a very clean case (with examples) for how to make console apps in .NET. If you think of standard.out/.in/.err as "TCP/IP or http for intracomputer tasks", you'll see consoles are actually great building blocks for interoperable apps.

Anyhow, it's neat to see .NET allowing Windows developers to finally, easily make apps like the ones that have been running on *NIX for decades, and to see an MS sanctioned rag not only showing you how, but recognizing explicitly that Windows has been lacking in this powerful tech for quite a while (blaming VB6's over-reliance on GUIs as well).