According to recent industry rumor, Longhorn won’t ship ’til 2006.
According to our internal OS folks, a new OS isn’t ubiquitous enough to target it as a base for new consumer application work for 6 years.
Even 2 years after .NET was available everywhere, people are still actively doing the MFC and VB6 thing.
2 years ’til 2006 + 6 years ’til ubiquity + 2 years not doing the new thing = 10 years of good, strong life left in Windows Forms at least.
In spite of my love on Avalon, I’m so confidendent that Windows Forms has a life left that I’m working with Mike on Windows Forms Programming 2/e. A book is hard enough that you don’t do it if the topic is dead, so that’s me putting my time (and Addison-Wesley’s money) where my mouth is.
With the bottom line more and more important, the era of “company loyalty” and “guaranteed employment” is long over. RentACoder.com takes this to it’s logical conclusion, matching vendors with jobs and money with qualified folks with the time and willingness to do the job at the asking price. As connectedness improves, the importance of being on site declines, the perfect market for services will develop, giving us eBay for employment.
Robert Hess, that .NET Show guy, talks about why he’s so into Longhorn in the recent .NET Shows lately:
“What you -do- need to pay attention to, is how ‘Longhorn’ will evolve the users concept of exactly what a Windows application is all about, and what features and functionality it should be providing them with. Many application developers should be starting to think about this TODAY, and how to begin incorporating some of these features into their application moving forward. Just the schematized file system that WinFS will introduce alone can represent not only a big jump in the potential functionality of an application, but also a considerable change in how your existing application might want to begin thinking about data storage.”
If you were listening to the .NET Rocks show today, you heard me invent something that Microsoft has already shipped: The Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer. <whew> One less thing I have to build myself. : )
Here. The one where it's late, I'm on my 3rd Diet Coke (I never use caffine), I stumble onto a piece of writing I like but have never published and decide what the hell...
I wrote this at the beginning of 2002 while
channeling my energies into the Windows Forms book. I never published it, but I
liked it (and I’m in writer avoidance mode as day #2 past my due date rolls by),
so I thought I’d share it:
The Dark Ages, a period of five
centuries beginning in 5 AD, marked a time of intellectual darkness and
barbarity. A ruling feudal class kept a firm grip on their over-worked
peasants in small enclaves eking out a meager living from the soil. Only
lonely, isolated monks were able to record knowledge using primitive tools
to painstakingly inscribing it into hand-crafted volumes, each unique and
each unavailable to their fellow man. Only pilgrims and adventures, willing
to endure long journeys and brave many hardships, had the chance of
obtaining this secret knowledge. Finally, the Renaissance, brought on by the
spread of knowledge in approachable formats using inventions like the
printing press, was able to rejuvenate a weary world and bring about a
period of intellectual growth and achievement that continues to this day
(interrupted only briefly by the Reagan years).
The
Browser Age, a period of ten years beginning in 1991, marked a time of
user-interface limitations and lowest common denominators. A ruling
standards body kept a firm grip on their over-worked participating members
in companies large and small, eking out a meager living from IPO wind-falls.
Only lonely, isolated web masters were able to record knowledge, using
primitive HTML to painstakingly code it into hand-crafted pages, each unique
and each unavailable to their fellow programmers. Only Perl programmers and
regular expressionists, willing to parse tangled byte streams and scrape
many screens, had the chance of separating the data from the presentation.
Finally, .NET, brought on by the spread of the information available
programmatically to rich client applications using inventions like Web
Services and Windows Forms [ed: and soon, Avalon], was able to
rejuvenate a weary software world and bring about a period of productivity
growth and achievement that will continue until long after we retire
(interrupted only briefly by the Internet Bubble burst).
