Jelle Druyts

I've been looking at the MSDN Developer Roadmap 2003 - 2005 and it all looks pretty interesting to me.

Between Whidbey (2004) and Orcas (2005) it looks like Whidbey scores highest on the coolness factor, thanks to the Yukon (next-gen SQL Server) integration which will allow stored procedures to be written in managed code. Orcas seems to be targeted mostly on integrating with Longhorn (next-gen Windows) so it will all depend on how ground-breaking that will be I guess.

Whidbey's VB.NET came as a bit of a surprise to me. It seems to incorporate many features I thought would be reserved for C# or the like - a form of generics, operator overloading, unsigned data types, ... I'm also glad to see they finally implemented inline xml code documentation - the thing I miss most in the current versions. Also cool: the return of "Edit and Continue" while breaking in a debug session. I wonder how that actually works (sounds like high impact on the CLR to me)...

The thing that looks the most useful in Visual C++ Whidbey is POGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) whichs "allows the compiler to instrument an application and collect information on how the application is used". This information enables Visual C++ to further optimize code based on real-world usage patterns.

Concerning my favorite language, C#, I'll be looking forward to experimenting with generics. It seems like one of those things which you use regularly but you know they have quite a lot of hidden power - if only you can find the right use for them. Furthermore, I always liked anonymous methods in Java so I'm looking forward to having that implemented too.

There are also quite a few enhancements in the .NET Framework worth mentioning, especially some controls I've missed (which meant dealing with interop and API calls): a managed Web browser control, a sound component (let's hope it supports mp3), layout managers, and even a BackgroundWorker component to handle asynchronous calls. Great improvements in ASP.NET include a GridView control (like a DataGrid but with automatic paging, sorting and editing) and what looks like an extensive templating mechanism using Master Pages, themes and skins. More cool-sounding buzzwords are ObjectSpaces (in ADO.NET) and of course WSE (Web Services Enhancements) integration. Let's hope Don Box has been doing something useful the last year

Finally, I'm pretty curious about the Visual Studio Tools for Office suite which will allow all those VBA-programmers out there to dive into the managed world. I'm glad to see they won't be left in the dark, but of course that makes sense when you think about how much applications are actually written in VBA.