I’ve been in IT for a little while now and I have to say that this is the most excited I’ve been since 2000. Why, well because of all the great stuff Microsoft plans to ship this year.
Here is a short list of what has me so excited.
I know I’m late to the Silverlight party since a lot of people felt like version 3 was a good product for developers. Well, I’m late on purpose. I remember taking a look at Silverlight 1 and 2 and thinking, hmmmm I wonder where this will go. Nothing there for me to go back to business and say we have to take a hard look at this now. With Silverlight 3 I finally started to see some real potential for the business, but I wanted see if the adoption rate would be good enough.
Now with Silverlight 4 getting ready to ship I finally feel comfortable standing up and saying lets take a hard look at Silverlight for business application development.
I consider this to really be the 3rd major release of the .Net Framework stack. I guess I’m most excited about the new parallel features that are coming with this version of the framework. But, what is more important is the fact that the framework continues to grow and get better.
I believe MVC has shown that it is here to stay. The latest improvements in MVC 2 have really addressed some of the rough edges that were in the MVC 1 release.
I see some debates raging about MVC vs. WebForms. Frankly I think the debates are a little silly as each technology has its niche. It reminds me of the old VB vs. C++ debates for doing Windows Forms development. Although MVC web development is no where near as complicated as building Windows Forms applications in C++ :D.
Just noticed that @scottgu published an article about this very subject as I am finishing up this blog posting. 413 Graves Mill RoadIsn’t it ironic. :D
Visual Studio 2010, all I can say is wow. Some people will think I’m full of it because on the surface it does not look like Visual Studio 2010 has a lot of improvements. I agree that a lot of the improvements are in specific areas (ex. SharePoint development), but the new Extension Manager model should not be overlooked.
I’ve seen some work coming out of the SharePoint camps that are taking advantage of the new Extension Manager. One great example is the work being done by Waldek Mastykarz.
The other thing that really has me excited is the new enhancements inside of Visual Studio 2010 Team System. Last week I watched a Channel 9 video about the new Test Lab Manager. The more I learn about these “little” enhancements the more I can vision software development teams increasing productivity and quality. Good stuff if you are a manager of a software development team.
I sort of saved the best for last in this case. While SharePoint 2010 will not be taking advantage of a lot of the new technology from Microsoft (MVC 2, .Net 4) there are some new features coming that make development a much better experience.
The new SharePoint Tools for SharePoint 2010 are great. While there is still room for improvement these show that Microsoft got the message about development experience with SharePoint.
I’m also really excited about the new client object model. This makes connecting to SharePoint data from AJAX, Javascript and Silverlight a palatable experience.
I am also really excited about the Developer Dashboard technology. I got to see this very early on and I almost made a mess in my pants. The reason is because I had just finished up going through a painstaking process of “find the bottleneck” with SharePoint.
Finally I’m pumped about the new Services architecture. This is the only major architecture change I can see in SharePoint 2010 (perhaps I am being myopic). This is a good thing as I think the upgrade from 2003 to 2007 was a lot to chew on. Anyway the new Services architecture shows a lot of promise for building new extensions to SharePoint. As soon as I saw the new model I thought of 2 new services that could add value to anyone running Publishing sites.
The team at Microsoft is getting ready to ship a lot of products this year. Big hats off to everyone involved.
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