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August 2007
August 14, 2007
.NET Future Directions
So you've gotten used to .NET 2.0, and are probably reading up on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), LINQ, and so on. You're probably thinking that there's a lot of parts to .NET now, and you're drinking from the proverbial firehose.
Microsoft hasn't even gotten warmed up.
Oh no, you say.
Well, yes. The future of .NET is evolving even as I write this. All of the disparate technologies that we focus on right now when reading MSDN, blogs out of the Microsoft developers, and articles written by developers, will be merged into .NET fully as .NET 3.x evolves.
Take a look at the diagram posted by Scott Hanselman.
Is that a doosy, or what? Almost makes you nauseous just looking at it. Especially if you're back up the food chain in the .NET 1.x or .NET 2.x area. Almost makes you feel out of date.
The thing that jumped out at me was the DLR - Dynamic Languages Runtime. This is a new area that Microsoft has pursued to allow dynamically typed languages like Python, Ruby, and JScript more fully play within the .NET universe. As this unfolds, it will be merged more fully into .NET in a new (marketing) term called CoreCLR. A parallel .NET technology called Silverlight will appear and will supplant much of what is done with ASP.NET today.
Staring at the diagram, I was left with the impression of sort of skipping some of the current generation of .NET UI technology in .NET 3.0. That is, a developer is faced with the constant question of "Do I take the time to learn technology X now, or wait for technology Y?". Particularly when large numbers of users in the field still use Windows 2000 & XP, and will likely do so for a time to come.
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited that .NET is evolving and competing head-to-head with technologies like Ruby (and Rails), and Java. But the middle of that diagram looks like a lot of R&D going on.
Interesting? Yes. Fun to play with? Definitely. But worth waiting and watching.
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 03:44 PM Permalink
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