The future of Web Development
Have you seen what's in store for Orcas (the next version of Visual Studio)? The release is slated for the 2nd half of 2007, and it looks like it's going to be an incredible release. Combine new language features along with some fancy new compiler features and you have one powerful development environment. Take a look at this post from Scott Gu.
Scott has been writing a series of posts that highlight new Orcas language features for C# and VB. In the link above, the most interesting thing is multi-platform targeting. The compiler in Orcas will be able to compile your web app to run in ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. That's pretty neat. It also highlights something else that's not getting so much press... The days of .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 development are coming to a close. With compelling language features and IDE support post .NET Framework 1.1, you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone that they should use .NET 1.x on any new development project.
You may remember a couple of months back I asked for your opinions on building on .NET 1.x. We took all of your feedback, along with analysis from other sources as well and have decided it is time to let go of the past. Starting with NetAdvantage 2007 Volume 2, Infragistics will no longer be building new features for the 1.x frameworks. This was a difficult choice for us to make, but it was the only one that made sense. In order to support older frameworks, currently our development teams are forced to write features using the lowest common denominator - or even worse, write 2 completely separate code streams. By dividing the code effort in half, and leveraging new language features, we can write better code, quicker. I'm sure all of you have had the same discussions with your bosses - "Please let us move to VS2005!!" Hopefully they're coming to the same realization that we have. You can't really argue with the facts. Have you used Generics? Have you see the auto memeber variable generation feature of Orcas? Nullable Types? Now we have Extension methods in Orcas (which are really cool), in addition to Linq.. (check out Scott's blog post - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/03/13/new-orcas-language-feature-extension-methods.aspx) Not using these features would be like entering the Daytona 500 on your bicycle.
The big question... What about support? We've got you covered. We may be dropping the .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 from our new feature development, but that does not mean we're no longer supporting it. We will continue to support the controls that were built on that platform - controls that you may be using in a production application, or are about to use. I believe we will be supporting these controls for another year, but don't quote me on that. That information will be made public shortly.
I am confident this is the right track for not just Infragistics, but anyone doing development on the .NET Framework. Being productive, efficient, and writing quality code isn't just about raw talent. If it was, we'd all be using Notepad and writing 