In-Depth
2009 and Beyond
Our panel of dev industry leaders and pundits provides a glimpse into the turbulent year ahead.
One of the most important roles of a development manager is to peer over the horizon for emerging technologies, trends and changes in business conditions.
There's no question that 2009 will prove a difficult if not outright disruptive time in that regard. In addition to the heady churn created by Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in late October, dev shops must contend with the unprecedented uncertainty created by the financial meltdown, which has led to the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. IDC last month dramatically cut back its 2009 IT spending forecast in the United States from a growth figure of 4.2 percent to just 0.9 percent.
What's a dev manager to do? We asked that very question of some leading luminaries in the software development world. Industry executives, analysts, experts and developers concur that the combination of what looks to be a prolonged downturn and emerging new compute models will significantly shape the development environment going forward. Developers face shrinking resources both in terms of staffing and software spending, while demands of the business will continue to increase. At the same time, the platforms they're accustomed to developing to are morphing.
Development and the Economy
Jobs at Risk
Andrew J. Brust, Chief of New Technology, twentysix New York
Many developers will lose their jobs. Ironically, this will help adoption of new technologies, as developers will have plenty of time to come up to speed on them and then drive implementations in late 2009 or in 2010 when hiring should restart. Market conditions will cause the SharePoint labor shortage to recede somewhat, though it will not disappear entirely. Microsoft, meanwhile, will enjoy an important competitive advantage in the lax economy thanks to its strong cash position.
The RIA Recession
Rob Helm, Director of Research, Directions on Microsoft
The PC application makes its last stand in 2010. Windows 7 will open new graphics capabilities to C++ developers, the slimmed-down .NET Framework client profile will be mainstream and Visual Studio 2010 will serve as a poster child for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) graphics APIs. All that will encourage developers to invest in PC apps. Unfortunately, there will be millions of PCs that can't take advantage of the new technologies, thanks to the downturn and the rise of cheap netbooks: applications on platforms like Silverlight and Flash can serve those PCs with far fewer deployment headaches than PC apps could.
Cost Cutting and Innovation
Bola Rotibi, Principal Analyst, Macehiter Ward-Dutton Ltd.
There will be little grand application building. Training budgets are likely to be severely cut, forcing developers to learn new programming and scripting languages on their own time. That said, hard times are ripe for innovative thinking and practices, so 2009 will see greater use of open source solutions and of tools freely given or easily accessible, as developers experiment with creating new types of apps and use new technologies.
Blended Source
Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation
In the open source arena, the macroeconomic conditions will decimate those start-ups that applied an open source veneer on a 1990s business model. The survivors will realize that using open source as part of their development and community strategy does not negate the requirement to create and capture value in their business. This will drive most -- if not all -- software companies to hybrid business models where software platforms are developed in open source, and high-value, product-differentiating technologies remain proprietary. At least for some period of time.
Key Trends
Developers Play Catch Up
Andrew J. Brust
Even as the Azure Services Platform evolves and readies for general availability, this will be a year of stabilization and catching up for the rest of the .NET platform. People will really digest WPF and Silverlight, as well as LINQ, Entity Framework, ASP.NET, Dynamic Data and other components of .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Developers will get a sense of what they like and what they don't; what they'll use and what parts they find gimmicky. They will become familiar with the technologies, and will be better able to articulate to Microsoft what is missing, especially in the tooling.
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"Many developers will lose their jobs. Ironically, this will help adoption of new technologies. " |
| Andrew J. Brust, Chief of New Technology, twentysix New York |
Hosted Development
Bola Rotibi
Microsoft will push the development facilities of Office and SharePoint to enable IT professionals and business domain users to easily and quickly configure and personalize applications for their needs. The next logical step for the company will be to start looking at providing hosted support for the software development platform, with potential for users to quickly create instances of their own development workbenches and test labs out in the cloud or hosted in third-party data centers.
Eclipse Interop
Mike Milinkovich
In 2009 the world of dev tools will continue to revolve around the two leading platforms: Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse. The main trend here will be increased emphasis on providing interoperability between these two platforms. Look for collaboration between Microsoft and Eclipse in several areas, such as language IDEs, open source support for Microsoft server platforms -- including utility computing -- and modeling.
OSS Détente
Andrew J. Brust
Microsoft's détente toward open source communities and standards bodies will continue. Internet Information Services will increasingly accommodate the "MP" stack: LAMP without the Linux and Apache parts, just MySQL and PHP. Also, Microsoft's love for the "productivity programmer" will reemerge. Redmond will work in earnest to make line-of-business and Data-Over-Forms app dev easier, just as it did with Visual Basic in the 1990s.
Waiting on a Cloud
Bola Rotibi
2009 will be a vibrant time for cloud- and hosted-services-based solutions, but many organizations without consulting or services support are likely to struggle with implementing cloud-based services due to architecture and planning questions. The challenge is not about how to build services, but what services to build and why.
Parallel Programming
James Reinders, Lead Evangelist, Intel Corp.
Parallel programming will be a hot topic regardless of programming language: C, C++, Fortran, C#, Java, Perl, Python, etc. Many more applications will emerge by the end of the year showing significant value from quad-core. Nevertheless, only half of programmers will work on a job assignment using parallelism during the year. Significant energy will be spent exploring attached processing power, such as general-purpose GPUs; deployments will be limited; and new entrants will make the future even more interesting.
ALM Ascendant
Bola Rotibi
2009 will see the scope of application lifecycle management (ALM) defined more succinctly around the process-management lifecycle, focusing on greater control and transparency within the heterogeneous tooling and infrastructure of many businesses. ALM players will compete on third-party tooling and solutions, and the breadth and strength of their partner and community ecosystems. Look for the focus to shift to agile development processes and methodologies to support change management and the like. Big-ticket, transformation-style ALM will be played down in favor of a more targeted approach.
Credit Crunch to Collaboration
Mike Milinkovich
The mega-trend we're observing is a worldwide interest by companies to become more successful in collaborative development. Macroeconomic realities are accelerating this trend as companies seek new approaches that will allow them to do more with less resources. Open source stands to gain from this trend, as existing communities like Apache and Eclipse already have well-defined processes for collaborative development.
The difference is that, historically, the majority of companies engaged in open source were software vendors or other technology providers. We're now seeing enterprises ranging from automobile manufacturers to insurance companies exploring what they can learn from collaborative communities, and applying those lessons to their innovation processes.
Model and Data-Driven Development
Declarative Future
Peter O'Kelly, Principal, O'Kelly Consulting
Declarative and model-driven abstractions are going to rapidly gain in popularity over the next 12 to 24 months. This wave will seem like a logical evolutionary step for database-focused architects and developers, but it will be a disruptive shift for many developers who are more focused on coding than analysis and design tools and techniques. The emerging declarative and model-driven abstractions, including XQuery for XML information manipulation and LINQ as a consistent data-integration framework for .NET developers, can dramatically improve developer productivity and help to produce applications that are more modularized and maintainable. These trends will make it critically important for dev managers to encourage all developers to think in terms of models.
Life After XML
Rob Helm
Microsoft's "Oslo" technology raises a question: Will developers still have to face XML in 2010? Today, developers on the Microsoft platform deal with a plethora of complex XML-based languages for configuration files and specialized programming tasks, while multiple Redmond product teams try to paper over all those languages with their own graphical tools. Oslo offers an alternative: a technology for creating readable specialized languages and a graphical toolset that can work with all of them. If Oslo can get traction outside of the Microsoft organization that developed it by 2010, developers might never have to see another angle-bracketed tag.
Database First
Peter O'Kelly
I think database management systems (DBMSes) will serve as the default storage subsystem for an expanding range of application scenarios over the next year or two. The advent of full-fidelity XML and file streaming support in leading DBMSes significantly expands the scope of the information-management requirements DBMSes can address, encompassing content, file and records management. DBMS-native services for analysis, integration, logging and reporting, as well as synchronization, make DBMSes much more flexible and productive than traditional file systems for use with modern application requirements.
Rich Internet Applications
No Clear Winner
Rob Helm
The rich Internet application (RIA) battle won't be settled by 2010. Flash and Flex, Silverlight and AJAX will all be contenders for the dominant Web client platform, because all three are backed by vendors -- Adobe Systems Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft -- who have shown they can build, buy or incubate major applications that show off their platforms. Who is that vendor for JavaFX?
| Guthrie's RIA Take
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, offers his takes on the forces and imperatives that will shape the rich Internet application (RIA) space over the next two years.
RIAs and the Cloud
Over the next year and beyond, we're going to see a growing number of designers and developers evaluate RIA platforms on the extent of their support for cloud computing. The software vendors that will excel in this space will not just be able to offer RIA designers and developers support for cloud computing in their development tools -- the bare minimum -- but will also offer a whole host of additional services such as storage and identity across both RIAs and in the cloud. Microsoft's Silverlight RIA platform and Azure cloud platform both use .NET as the fundamental programming model.
From my perspective, RIA designers and developers are going to select RIA platforms not just because of the capabilities of the vendor's client or development tools, but because of the quality and reliability of their cloud infrastructure and end-to-end offering.
RIAs and Security
As Microsoft has taken significant steps to make its products more secure, hackers have begun to target the application layer. We think over the next year and beyond, designers and developers of RIAs are going to select platforms that have the best security track record. They'll be looking for those that have the fewest identified vulnerabilities and that have been architected from the ground up to provide both enterprises and consumers with rock-solid protection against malware and other emerging threats.
RIAs and Choice
Over the next year and beyond, we think designers and developers are going to choose RIA platforms that provide more choice with regards to development language. They want their RIA platforms to support a variety of static languages as well as scripting languages that are popular in the developer community.
For example, because Microsoft Silverlight contains a subset of .NET Framework, you can use any managed programming language -- VB, C#, Managed JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby -- with the browser plug-in. As a result, I think we're going to see a whole host of new application types and development workflows that will proliferate as a result of this movement toward choice. |
Hybrid RIA Apps
Peter O'Kelly
Hybrid software-and-service offerings, such as the pairing of Microsoft Outlook with Microsoft Exchange Online, and Web-centric experiences extended with Flash Player or Silverlight code running locally are poised for very rapid market uptake. Microsoft Visual Studio and Adobe Flex now make the hybrid model accessible to mainstream developers. As a result, RIA user experiences will become the norm for both intranet and Internet scenarios, improving user productivity and reducing the number and variety of specialized tools and frameworks previously required for advanced Web-centric application domains.
Enterprise Pick Up
Bola Rotibi
I expect Silverlight, Flex and Flash to move beyond the consumer space and earn the attention of enterprise dev shops. And look for Microsoft to focus its development messaging for the enterprise. ISVs, application content providers and the professional services community are still the most likely sectors to build applications using a combination of AJAX, Silverlight, Flex and Flash and even JavaFX technologies.
Hardware and Systems
Advanced interfaces
Brad Carpenter, General Manager, Surface Team, Microsoft
The touch trend is growing and emerging in more and more products. While I spend my time focusing on touch from a Surface computing perspective, we're starting to see PCs in desktop and laptop forms add touch experiences in their products. From a developer standpoint, I think we'll start to see more cross-platform integration so that developers can port touch-enabled applications onto various devices -- from laptop to PC, surface computer, music player or phone.
Age of Robots
Tandy Trower, General Manager, Robotics Division, Microsoft
By the end of 2010, we should see a variety of affordable PC-based, wirelessly connected robotic platforms, which can navigate autonomously, as well as next-generation robots supporting dexterous manipulation. We'll also begin to see serious, compelling applications that are driven by advances in navigation and user interaction.
Progress and adoption will start to grow exponentially, so I expect that by 2013 or 2015 we may see the knee in the curve and we'll see a wide variety of robots. Every home won't just have one robot but more likely more than one, doing different tasks and deeply integrated into our digital infrastructure.
Evolving Clients
James Reinders
Dual-core processors will become the minimum configuration for virtually all PCs, with quad-core processors becoming prevalent. The emergence of solid-state disks (SSDs) will help break I/O bottlenecks, making higher processor-core counts more useful. However, SSD will still account for only a minority of drives found in new PCs at the end of 2009.