In-Depth
Peering into the Future
Experts predict what developers should expect in 2008.
The year 2007 was one of unprecedented activity in the Microsoft development arena. The folks in Redmond dished out new preview and shipping versions of Visual Studio, .NET Framework, SQL Server and a host of key graphic, data and communication technologies over the past 12 months. Included were helpings of new languages (F#), new platforms (Silverlight) and entirely new ways of doing things (Language Integrated Query [LINQ], Entity Frameworks).
Will 2008 be the year when we try to digest it all? What technologies, trends, issues and challenges are most likely to face dev managers as they enter the new year?
We posed that question to some very knowledgeable and esteemed pundits to see what they're expecting in 2008. Our panel of prognosticators includes: Mary Jo Foley, a leading industry blogger and Redmond magazine columnist; Roger Jennings, principal consultant at Oakleaf Systems and author of numerous books on Microsoft development platforms; Rockford Lhotka, principal technology evangelist at Magenic Technologies Inc.; Jim Payne, VP and senior lead analyst/ architect of integrated partner solutions at Citigroup Inc.'s Citi Cards unit; Peter Varhol, executive editor, reviews for Redmond magazine and columnist for RDN; Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer for the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center; and William F. Zachmann, contributing editor to RDN and director of Canopus Research Inc.
From emerging security challenges to shifting hiring trends to the outlook on all those new Redmond-born technologies, we cast a wide net to offer insights, forecasts and opinions that should help you best determine what's in store in the unpredictable world of .NET development. So what kind of year will it be? Read on to find out.
WPF and Traditional Client and Server Development
Rich client development is hardly passé. From WPF to parallel programming to the power of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), there's a lot on the radar in 2008.
WPF Activity to Build
Rockford Lhotka
Now that Visual Studio 2008 is out, I expect adoption of WPF to start picking up. At the same time, WPF remains a young and immature technology, and so over the next few months it'll be more expensive to build WPF interfaces than Windows Forms or ASP.NET interfaces. I fully expect to see a continual flow of new third-party controls for WPF, and that will help boost productivity and encourage adoption.
Ride the Rich Client
Peter Varhol
Another year will go by without a compelling WPF application for the masses. It may catch on as the UI standard eventually, but not this year. The rich client, though, will make a comeback. Microsoft makes it easier still to develop applications that are tied to Windows, and developers will respond in droves.
One way Microsoft is making rich client development easier is through frameworks such as "Acropolis," which provides wizards for easy and consistent UI creation. It also enforces a separation between UI and business logic and compartmentalizes logic components in a class structure called Parts.
Designer Challenge
Rockford Lhotka
The big challenge for organizations using either WPF or Silverlight will be to lure designers into the Microsoft space. What little history designers have with Microsoft hasn't been all that positive, and it'll take some effort to convince designers to give XAML a try.
For the open-minded designer and the forward-looking Windows or Web developer, the next few months should be very exciting. I believe we're at the start of a major change in how users experience both Windows and Web applications.
Ex-Adobe CEO to Lead Expression
Mary Jo Foley
Bruce Chizen, Adobe's CEO who abruptly resigned in 2007, has been mum on his future plans. But sources say Chizen is going to join Microsoft to run the Expression team in the new year.
As Microsoft watchers know, Adobe and Microsoft are competing head-to-head in the design-tool space. If the sources are right (and there are no non-competes in the way), Chizen may be helping lure developers to WPF, Silverlight and XAML.
Multi-Core Revolution
William F. Zachmann
Driven by Intel and AMD, with a strong push from Microsoft, 2008 is the year that retires the single-processor, single-core PC. Look for dev tools to catch up. Microsoft just released Parallel Extensions for .NET 3.5, which makes it easier for programmers to tune code for two, four or more cores. Expect more tools, guidance and resources for all things multi-core in '08.
Parallel Programming Gets a Rough Start
Jim Payne
Parallel programming starts with a proper design, but I expect to see in the beginning a lot of flops in this area as people go bonkers slicing up their processes in an ad infinitum amount of threads and wind up actually doing less with more CPUs. It's going to be up to Microsoft to really help educate the dev community. If the right pattern can emerge as a good reference architecture/design then this will have a positive impact, but I see a negative impact in the beginning based upon sheer misunderstanding and ignorance. Just because you can do something doesn't always mean that you should.
Flirting with Team System
Peter Varhol
VSTS makes incremental inroads in development processes. Development teams pick and choose from Team System features depending on their needs, but still hold back from completely drinking the Kool-Aid.
Outsourcing Slows
Jim Payne
I think that overall there's going to be a saddle-point reached where businesses realize they'll have to balance cost with quality and speed-to-market. My personal experience is that I have a harder time finding qualified and consistent talent offshore than I can find within the States. The biggest headache we've faced is offshore turnover. We get people "trained" and up to speed on what we're trying to accomplish, and one month later they're gone.
 |
"I have a harder time finding qualified and consistent talent offshore than I can find within the States." |
Jim Payne, VP and Senior Lead Analyst/Architect,
Integrated Partner Solutions, Citigroup Inc. |
SILVERLIGHT AND RIA
Microsoft's rich Internet application (RIA) platform and strategy has big implications for millions of developers.
Like a Rocket
Peter Varhol
Silverlight will take off like a rocket. There's just too much here not to like. Developers use the same .NET skills they've been honing for the last several years to build exciting cross-platform Web applications.
Silverlight First
Rockford Lhotka
I expect Silverlight will achieve faster adoption than WPF, even though it's even less mature and basically uses the same tools.
For some reason, Web developers and their business sponsors are often more willing to take risks and accept higher costs than their Windows-focused counterparts. So even though Silverlight is essentially WPF's "little brother," I expect to see a lot of excitement and activity around Silverlight application development over the next year.
Contrarian View
Roger Jennings
I'm not as sanguine about Silverlight's prospects in 2008. Lack of penetration by version 1.0, limited developer tools and few standard controls hamper its progress against Adobe's entrenched competitor. Reversioning Silverlight 1.1 to 2.0 won't make anyone believe it's close to a mature product. |
WEB DEVELOPMENT
From ASP.NET to the fate of Windows Live, what can we expect from development for the Web?
ASP.NET Sunset?
Peter Varhol
ASP.NET AJAX use will peak and begin to decline as Silverlight takes off. AJAX remains a cool hack, but it's still just old technology being used in a new way.
Big Developments
Roger Jennings
Hot on the heels of the ASP.NET 3.5 bits come the Extensions. The model view controller (MVC) framework and Blinq-like Dynamic Data scaffolding bring a Rails-flavored development environment to .NET. But I'm counting on Rob Conery's forthcoming SubSonic release to be more popular for data-driven sites.
Erik Meijer's "Volta" project takes refactoring to a new extreme; wait until the last minute and refactor an entire site from a single-client to three-tier server farm by adding a few annotations and pressing F5. Volta appears a bit off-the-wall at first blush, but given Meijer's track record with LINQ, I think Volta has a similar chance for success as it incubates in 2008.
What's Wrong with Windows Live?
Mary Jo Foley
Microsoft already has a developer platform for Live but has done a terrible job in publicizing it and making it understandable. It has already delivered a lot of the functionality that Google is promising, but you'd never know it. Surprisingly, instead of doing what it usually does by talking in broad strokes about a unified development platform, with Live Microsoft is taking a custom approach and offering partners individual bundles/deals. As a result, Microsoft appears to be "platformless" on the Live side of the house.
I don't think the 'Softies are making the idea of a unified/understandable Live-development platform a priority. The defections on the Live-dev side of the house make it seem like they don't have their act together there and won't any time soon.
IE8 Won't Be Great
Mary Jo Foley
Microsoft will finally field a beta of Internet Explorer [IE] 8 in 2008. But it won't ship until 2009. And it won't make people happy -- that's a guaranteed prediction -- given that Microsoft remains caught between a rock and a hard place: Make IE fully standards-compliant and break all existing IE-optimized apps, or continue to go halfway with standards compliance and continue to make developers angry.
The Web, in 3-D
William F. Zachmann
The Internet browser was a radical innovation in the mid-1990s. Today it's so familiar that everyone takes it for granted. But its days are numbered. The future belongs to a new class of Internet client: the three-dimensional virtual reality (VR) renderer.
We're very close now to the tipping point. The renderer won't replace the browser overnight, but by the end of 2008 it'll be the hottest topic in the industry. Forget all that tired old Web 2.0 stuff. 2008 will be the year of the
3-D VR renderer.
"I'm counting on Rob Conery's forthcoming SubSonic release to be more popular for data-driven sites."
Roger Jennings, Author and Principal Consultant,
Oakleaf Systems |
DATA SAVVY
Microsoft has been working overtime to improve programmatic data handling and management -- and that means you have decisions to make in '08.
LINQ Blizzard
Roger Jennings
The pace of Microsoft's new technology announcements will slow in 2008. There's no way that developers can even stay abreast of Redmond's new data- and Web-related offerings, let alone become competent in their use.
As an example, Visual Studio 2008 finalized the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) stack in mid-November 2007. Going into the new year Microsoft will have six (count 'em, six!) official LINQ implementations in the hopper: LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, LINQ to DataSets, LINQ to Entities, LINQ to REST and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ). I'm betting 50 or more third-party LINQ implementations arrive by the time 2008 comes to a close. On the downside, by Microsoft's own admission, LINQ to SQL has no "out-of-the-box multi-tier" story. Hopefully, the same fate won't befall the Entity Framework.
XML Futures
Jim Payne
Most of what we do as developers in the business-systems space is data manipulation and data transformation between systems. This is usually between one or more legacy systems. That makes XSLT, XPath and, eventually, XQuery hugely important in 2008.
Getting data into XML can really make life a lot easier -- provided that the size of the data you're working with is manageable -- because then XSLT can really give you a lift. My organization has realized many benefits of working with XSLT and XPath over the past seven years, and I think that many development organizations will gravitate to the technology once they get some real exposure.
I also see that Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in the Microsoft arena will get the traction it has been lacking, and the endpoint communication heavy lifting will be mitigated to a simple abstraction. |
Microsoft Tracker
According to Mary Jo Foley, 2008 will be ...
... the year Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie emerges from the shadows and proves himself ... or doesn't. My bet: Ozzie stays the mystery man.
... the time when Microsoft should be delivering a first test build of Office 14 ... or acknowledge it's late. My bet: There will be a build, but probably only for those with strict non-disclosure agreements. Currently, the word is Microsoft is still tracking for 2009 for Office 14, even though Windows 7 won't hit till 2010.
... the year the company makes some real gains in search market share ... or buys Yahoo!. My bet: No major search gains are in Microsoft's near-term future. They aren't going to buy Yahoo!, but watch for them to buy Ask or another smaller search player instead.
... the year when some compelling Windows Vista apps -- consumer and/or business -- debut ... or Microsoft concedes that Vista is another Windows ME. My two cents: Microsoft will never concede defeat publicly. But I wouldn't be surprised to see "Fiji," the update to Windows Media Center that should hit in the latter half of 2008, get a lot of marketing emphasis from Microsoft to help provide Vista air cover in the consumer space.
SERVICES AND SOA
Everyone agrees: You'd better get ready for a world of services.
The World of Services
Peter Varhol
If you're not already writing and/or consuming Web services, you'll be doing one or the other -- or both -- by the end of the year. You'll especially be calling external services such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Virtual Earth.
REST Ascendant
Roger Jennings
It's clear that Microsoft finally groks the REST story; ADO.NET Data Services is the first and only RESTful data access offering from a major relational database management system (RDBMS) vendor. Atom and JSON will deliver what SOAP promised while it was still the Simple Object Access Protocol (i.e., before WS-*). WCF 3.5's added Atom and RSS-feed capabilities assure this foundation's popularity among services-oriented developers in 2008.
Forrester Research Inc. on SOA
In 2008, enterprise architects will find themselves at the center of a struggle to change their organizations into significantly more agile enterprises. As solution delivery morphs from traditional in-house custom development to the integration of an amalgam of components, architects will realize that they need more than a services-oriented architecture strategy. They will need an integrated approach to mapping out the full vision for their architectures and solutions. And they will need to rapidly develop new skills, tap into new talent and leverage new toolsets to accommodate the increasing scope of EA initiatives.
From "Five Trends That Will Shape the EA Profession in 2008," Dec. 14, 2007. |
 |
"In 2008, Vista SP1 is going to turn Vista
into the OS it should have been when it
was shipped more than a year ago." |
| Mary Jo Foley, Leading Industry Blogger |
SECURITY
Security was once a user problem. Then it also became an IT problem, and then it became an ISV problem as well. Now security is everyone's problem. Here's what our experts see.
Security SLAs
Johannes Ullrich
Fed up with security-related flaws and vulnerabilities, customers will start to demand that security be built into their apps as part of the contract. A security spec will be included in the contract for software as it's written. Siemens is demanding this of work they contract today, and others will going forward.
Developers will need to be ready for this. How do they respond and provide some confidence that they're actually able to meet these security requirements?
The result is that developers must start with more standardized code and reuse, while making secure design and security review a larger part of the development lifecycle. Training of developers in secure coding practices will be part of that transition.
Hacker Threats
Johannes Ullrich
The ongoing battle over software integrity continues as more sophisticated tools emerge for finding vulnerabilities in code. The challenge will continue to be greatest with older, legacy software.
Humans will continue to get targeted, but look for more "mass customized" attacks that take phishing and fraud to a new level. Attackers will no longer try to send as much e-mail as possible, but instead try to increase the chances of the payload being executed.
Phishing Stays First
Jim Payne
Phishing will continue to be a problem for organizations, especially banks, but I think that in financial services we're going to see more and more incidents of pretexting [social engineering] attempts taking place simply because there's more hardening of the perimeter and applications are getting "smarter" in the form of controls and access, etc.
Pretexting is really a low-tech approach and takes advantage of poorly trained employees, or vague and untested policies.
Languages and Foundations
The foundational change of .NET 3.0 is behind us, but there's more to come.
Forrester on Developing to Business Goals
Application development and program management professionals struggle to meet business expectations. In 2008, five trends will emerge that will make this harder in the short-term but easier in the long-term. These trends will require alterations in application development and program management staffing, behavior, organizational structure, processes, and tooling. Look for:
- Diversification of the software supply chain
- The need to build for change
- Shorter development and delivery cycles
- Disruptive technologies and architectures that affect the programming approach
- The changing role of the business analyst
From "Five Trends That Will Shape the Application Development & Program Management Profession in 2008," Dec. 14, 2007. |
Language Evolves
Roger Jennings
Managed JavaScript, IronPython, IronRuby and the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) will share a dynamic-type system and hosting model that enables cross-coding with traditional, statically typed VB and C#.
F# promises to bring functional programming out of the university lecture halls and into real-world, math-intensive scientific projects. In the meantime, professional C# and VB programmers are up to their necks in extension methods, anonymous types, lambda functions, implicitly typed variables, object initializers and other additions specific to LINQ.
Frodo Lives!
Peter Varhol
Believe it. Visual Basic 6 lives on. Microsoft will blink in the face of massive user opposition and agree to continue support for another year.
Windows Vista
The client OS that wouldn't die could finally become the client OS most businesses will deploy. What's ahead?
Vista, Finally Finished
Mary Jo Foley
In 2008, Vista SP1 is going to turn Vista into the operating system it should have been when Microsoft shipped it more than a year ago.
There will finally be enough working drivers, adequate networking performance and workable hibernate/shut-down functionality to make the operating system more of a credible XP upgrade. I'm doubtful we'll see massive corporate adoption in 2008. In fact, I'll be watching closely to see what kinds of numbers Microsoft makes public regarding the number of copies Vista sells next year, given that volume licensees still won't be deploying the release at full throttle.
Broadening Vistas
William F. Zachmann
In 2008, the migration from Windows XP to Windows Vista will finally gather serious momentum, boosted by Windows Server 2008 and a blizzard of new Microsoft server-side products. Surrounded by the new versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio, among other products, Windows Vista will be at the center of the most comprehensive advance in Microsoft platforms since Windows 2000. The impressive update could ultimately push Microsoft enterprise rivals like IBM, Sun and Oracle to the side.
VIRTUALIZATION
There's so much going on in the world of virtualization that Redmond Media Group is planning a new publication about the technology. So what's next for developers when it comes to virtualization?
Virtual Machines Everywhere
William F. Zachmann
Virtualization -- of just about everything in the real IT world -- will be red-hot in '08. We're already well along the way with virtual client and server systems, virtual storage, virtual networks and of course virtual testing environments for development. It all gets better, faster and cheaper in the year ahead. VMware, Microsoft and EMC lead the way and everyone else follows. Developers will be carrying custom-tailored virtualized deployments on USB keys and hard drives everywhere they go.
Licensing Twists Abound
Mary Jo Foley
There could be some interesting new licensing twists around virtualization in 2008 as the technology starts to take off more in Microsoft shops. With Microsoft adding Hyper-V to Windows Server 2008, even customers who've barely dabbled with virtual machines are going to have a chance to play with virtualization and discover new ways to use it for server consolidation, etc.
Microsoft and its competitors are going to have to figure out how not to lose their shirts, licensing-wise, as customers buy fewer copies of operating systems and applications because they can run workloads virtually.