Speculations about .NET 4.0

I found this in my Live Writer drafts. I figured I should send it, since its been a month and I haven’t thought of anything to add to it.

*insert timewarp to March 18th, 2008*

I was at the Visual Studio 2008 launch in Detroit today. This was my 3rd Microsoft Launch event. The first being Visual Studio 2005 and the second being Vista/Office2k7. As a developer the Vista launch was really the .NET 3.0 launch to me.

One thing I’ve learned that I don’t do well and I need to do better is future think. What is next?

• ASP.NET 3.5 “extensions” will be known as ASP.NET 4.0
  • ASP.NET MVC (see MonoRail)
  • ASP.NET Dynamic Data (see Rails scaffolding or MonoRail scaffolding)
  • ASP.NET AJAX (browser history, but I expect more here)
  • ADO.NET Entity Framework (see NHibernate)
  • ADO.NET Data Services (many projects to see here, snooze is one)
  • Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET (I expect much more here)
• Full development support for Silverlight will ship along with this release.
• WPF finally get an editable Grid. It won’t be named DataGrid, DataGridView or GridView(exists in WPF as a ListView mode). It may be named DataViewGrid or GridDataView.
• A WPF “Dynamic Data” library complements the ASP.NET extension.
• The System.Core.Enumerable class gets a Each extension method. Its name endlessly confuses developers who don’t understand why it wasn’t there in 3.5 and who don’t know why it isn’t ForEach like Array and List<>. Developers start calling Microsoft’s naming difference a “catch up to Ruby”.
• A handful of new Workflow activities are released but no one knows what they are, what they do, or how do to use them.
• Cardspace continues and adds even easier support for OpenID but no one knows what they are, what they do, or how do to use them.
• Like the 3.0 release the languages and compilers don’t change.
• a DI/IoC container with a subset of the features of Windsor, Spring.net, StructureMap or even EntLib ObjectBuilder is included!
• DLR still won’t ship. No IronPython. No IronRuby. Python and Ruby will remain the most common languages used in demo for Silverlight.
• Visual Source Safe is still the recommended version control system if you can’t afford Team Foundation Server. WTF?
• There will be some hidden PerfCounter, WMI, awesomeness. It won’t be documented very well.
• Hibernate and NHibernate users everywhere are stunned and gape mouthed when they see Entity Framework. Then they fall out of their chair laughing. “We hate maintaining our single HBM files, you want to maintain 3 uglier XML files (CDSL, MSL, SSDL)?” Microsoft answers these cries with “use the designer”, but the power developers want to do things that are only possible in the XML that the designer cannot do.