RDN Directions
A Year in Review
Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are the most important events for developers in the past 12 months.
At the end of 2006, I wrote that if Windows Vista were a Christmas present to developers, it would have come with the label "batteries not included" because developers didn't have the tools they needed to really build applications. Now, at the end of 2007, Santa finally delivered the rest of the goods -- in the form of Visual Studio (VS) 2008 -- and developers can finally see what those shiny new toys can do. In between, Microsoft took aim at a longtime partner now turned platform competitor.
Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are the most important events for developers in the past 12 months. Besides catching up with the Vista platform, VS 2008 contains big improvements in bread-and-butter areas like accessing and manipulating data from DBMSes and XML.
There are many reasons for the tepid response to Vista among corporate buyers, but the lack of compelling apps that tapped into its new capabilities didn't help. That's particularly true for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the new graphics engine and API built into Vista. Microsoft certainly hopes that now that VS 2008 and the Expression tools have shipped, and developers can build WPF apps without having to create and edit XAML files by hand, creative ISVs and corporate developers will build the kinds of applications that encourage a round of OS upgrades.
Luckily, VS 2008 is more than just a catch-up release. To say that corporate applications access data of some sort is a massive understatement. Retrieving, manipulating, displaying and updating data from DBMSes is the lifeblood of nearly every corporate business app. With Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Microsoft is taking aim at the kind of problems that cause pain for developers each and every day. Simply put, LINQ is a revolutionary step and the biggest thing Microsoft has done for developers since the introduction of the .NET Framework. It lets developers write SQL-style queries directly in C# and Visual Basic and bridges the gap between object-oriented programming languages and relational databases.
So even if you yawn at Vista, say "thanks but no thanks" to Office 2007 and don't know SharePoint from Shinola, Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are must-have upgrades.
Taking Aim at Adobe
While one part of Microsoft's Developer Division spent most of 2007 pushing Visual Studio out, another was picking a fight with Adobe, a company that's both a Windows ISV and platform competitor.
Since acquiring Macromedia in 2005, Adobe has set out to transform its core technologies -- Flash and the Portable Document Format (PDF) -- into a platform. It built server products that let corporations use PDF in mission-critical apps while establishing Flash as an indispensable part of any Web browser.
Prove it yourself: Uninstall Flash and start surfing. Count how many pages you get to before you're prompted to reinstall it. OK, a lot of those pages will be ads that you might skip anyway, but the list would also include virtually any site with Web-based video, including YouTube and The New York Times.
Microsoft's first commandment could be "thou shalt have no other platforms before me," so it wasn't hard to predict that Adobe's platform ambitions would attract Microsoft's attention.
It took time to get there, but with Silverlight, Microsoft could have a credible alternative to Flash. The current version is modest in its goals-focusing on the video aspects of Flash -- but in 2008 Microsoft promises a version that includes the .NET Framework. Redmond hopes to fend off Flash as a broader platform for rich Internet applications (RIAs).
Adobe's building on loyalty to Photoshop and related products, while reaching out to developers with Flex, an integrated development environment built on the open source Eclipse project. Adobe is also extending Flash through its Adobe Integrated Runtime -- a cross-platform runtime that lets developers build desktop applications with the same technologies used to build RIAs, including Flash, HTML, AJAX and PDF.
The Fights Ahead
With Silverlight, Microsoft is chasing Adobe's taillights, but if Redmond succeeds, it won't be the first time the company has started from behind only to end up winning. And Microsoft starts with a clear advantage among developers: Visual Studio is widely used and a far more comprehensive development environment than Flex.
2008 looks to be another important year. In addition to learning how to best use the 2007 products, expect to see updates to Silverlight, more improvements to data access and perhaps some early information about the next version of Windows.
About the Author
Greg DeMichillie analyzes and writes about Microsoft's development platform and tools for Directions on Microsoft, a research firm dedicated to tracking Microsoft. He was previously the group program manager at Microsoft responsible for the overall design and feature set for Visual C# and C++. A founding member of the C# language team, DeMichillie was a key contributor to the initial design and development of .NET.