A sampling of .NET Developer's Journal editorial board members and Microsoft Regional Directors offer their thoughts - with varying degrees of seriousness - on what the coming year will bring.

Terry Weiss
terryw@mentissolutions.com

Terry Weiss is chief technical officer of Mentis Solutions (www.MentisSolutions.com) and a Microsoft Regional Director.

• Mobile computing: I think the most interesting developments will be in mobile computing in 2004. The release and adoption of Smartphone technologies will help to clarify the role of the PDA in the marketplace and should place the power of these devices in the hands of those that might not otherwise use them. The convenience offered by the combination of a PDA and cell phone should accelerate the creation of a truly wireless infrastructure for business to speed up the value chain life cycle and gain a competitive edge by speeding up the flow of information.

  .NET's seamless integration of the bits for dealing with both rich mobile clients and Web-based mobile interfaces puts it in a unique position to leverage the promise of this industry development with a minimum of rework and investment from business. This should result in speeding up the realization of ROI in this technology. For developers this could result in a paradigm shift in terms of how we think about how to route data and where it goes.

  In a similar vein, the growth of tablet computing will see the increased adoption of ink-based rich client experiences. The only sane route to producing code for this platform is .NET - and I would not be surprised to see some new and truly different types of programs in the next 12 months as developers begin to gain experience, get comfortable with this form factor, and begin to really exploit it.

• WS-I: .NET is becoming synonymous with Web services. The excellent work that Don Box and his group have been doing with the Web Services Enhancements (http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/wse) to implement and supplement the work of the Web Services Interoperability folks (www.ws-i.org) further solidifies this relationship. The early availability of these bits and their almost "no-brainer" consumption will, I believe, result in the majority of WS-I-compliant implementations being based on .NET, if for no other reason than that the majority of the heavy lifting has already been done. And I think this will also help to promote the proliferation of the WS-I standards themselves, which I believe to be critical to the success of the Web services platform as a means of interoperating in an increasingly service-oriented world with predictable and repeatable results across industries and projects.

• RFID: RFID (radio frequency identification) is just starting to mature, and the planned Wal-Mart implementations with their top 100 vendors will have far-reaching effects on the rest of the industry if they are successful. By its very nature RFID demands robust messaging, serialization, and IP protocol management. I think .NET's strengths in these areas are unmatched and will increasingly be associated with RFID due to its unique ability to produce this kind of code very quickly and easily. Setting up endpoints and advertising/broadcasting the messages of these lightweight units almost screams for the native abilities of .NET, not to mention the depth and quality of the tools for dealing with these implementations that Visual Studio provides.

Based in San Diego, Brian Loesgen is a principal consultant with Neudesic, a firm specializing in .NET development and Microsoft server integration. Brian is a coauthor of several books and is currently working on the BizTalk Server 2004 Developers Guide, due in 2004. Brian is a cofounder and president of the International .NET Association (ineta.org) and a member of the .NETDJ editorial board.

• 2004 will be the year of Web services, just like 2003 and 2002 were. But, this time it's for real. All the pieces we've needed, from front-end support like InfoPath through to back-end management, provisioning, security, and orchestration are falling into place. Companies that took tentative steps down the Web services path in 2003 and have reaped the benefits will fully commit and Web services will be woven into their application landscape. Companies integrating disparate systems will turn increasingly toward Web services as an integration mechanism. Developers who couldn't even spell SOA (Services-Oriented Architecture) in 2003 will find that it's their new mantra.

• Xbox 2 will be announced and probably ship late in the year (and I say that based on no known facts provided by no credible sources). Halo 2 will be released. Halo-related Xbox-Live traffic will exceed overall Internet traffic. The resulting loss of developer productivity will seriously jeopardize the global economic recovery. As more and more developers beat the game, sanity will return and the recovery will resume.

• The new book BizTalk Server 2004 Developers Guide will make its debut in the No. 3 position on the New York Times best-seller list. The resulting movie rights deal will eclipse all previous movie deals made around developer books.
  Or not.

Andrew J. Brust is president of Progressive Systems Consulting. He is the Microsoft Regional Director for New York and New Jersey, a member of the INETA Speaker's Bureau, and a vice chairman of the New York Software Industry Association.

• Yukon: Yukon will change the database market in a profound way. I think it will unambiguously establish Microsoft as the undisputed market leader, even in the analysts' eyes. In terms of price, performance, and features, it will be unmatched, and its ability to scale up to huge 64-bit and multiprocessor machines as well as down to mobile devices will be icing on the cake. Probably its biggest hallmark will be the way it brings business intelligence (BI) to the masses, and really integrates BI technology into the developer mainstream. This momentum has been building since the release of SQL Server 7's OLAP Services, but it's Yukon's BI story, including OLAP, data mining, and Reporting Services, that's going to blow the market wide open. In our upcoming book on Yukon for Microsoft Press, my coauthors (Stephen Forte and Bill Zack) and I will dedicate a significant amount of coverage to these features.

• .NET corporate adoption: In the past few months, I've started to see hard evidence that .NET's penetration into the corporate world, especially with financial firms here in New York, is starting to gain an incredible amount of momentum. While getting companies to consider Microsoft technology over J2EE was in many past instances an uphill battle, the equation has started to shift. In 2004, you'll see organizations start to focus on how to best use .NET in their environments, rather than why or whether to use it. We'll shift, in many cases, from .NET being an issue to it being a fact. That's not to say that it will be a cakewalk for .NET every time - IBM's stack is J2EE - and IBM/IBM Global Services are incredibly formidable competitors. But we'll get to the point where .NET is viewed with respect - and often with enthusiasm - by CIOs and CTOs, and that will change everything.

• .NET job market/in-demand skills: I cofounded the New York City .NET Developer Group about a year and a half ago. Early on, we decided it would be a good idea to have an opt-in listserv for job postings. I can tell you from what I've seen this year that in 2004 the number of jobs, the quality of the positions, and the salary levels will all increase significantly. Then again, the level of prerequisites will increase as well. Next year, we'll be at a crossroads: IT budgets will finally be increasing by a healthy measure, but the trend of sending vanilla development work offshore will grow, not contract. What this will leave in the domestic job market is spots for specialized, high-end people.

  I would encourage people to learn the .NET Base Class Library really well. Concentrate on security, Enterprise Services, threading, and remoting. Know C# and know it well. (As a VB developer, I find that requirement to be absurd, but it's there, so go with it - the languages aren't terribly different anyway.) Project management, modeling, and analysis/ requirements-gathering skills will all help too. It's clear to me that people will ask for all of this because the market will still have some softness and employers will know they can be this demanding. Humor them: study up, ace your technical interviews, and stretch yourself professionally; it will pay dividends later.

Gary Cornell is a cofounder and the publisher of Apress, the leading publisher of .NET books for programming professionals. Gary has been a professor of mathematics, a visiting scientist at IBM's Watson Labs, and a program director at the National Science Foundation.

• J2EE will lose market share. Both .NET and the PHP/MySQL combination will gain.
• Once again it will not be the year of the Linux desktop.
• Server-side (Bayesian) spam filtering will finally start to put a dent into spam.
• Office 2003 will actually gain traction as its XML features prove compelling for companies.
• There will be at least one virus/worm that knocks most of the Internet out for a few days.
• WiFi rules.
• Sun will either buy a software company like BEA outright or merge with another company.
• Apple will go nowhere in its market share and might actually lose share.
• The Tablet PC will come into its own with its third generation as the power increases and the cost differential diminishes.
• We will be drowned by politicians who - following Howard Dean's successful use of it - finally discover the Internet.

Scott Hanselman is chief architect at the Corillian Corporation, an e-finance enabler. Scott has been the MSDN Regional Director for Portland, Oregon, for the past three years. Scott and Corillian participate in a number of Working Groups with the Web Service Interoperability Organization (WS-I).

• The year of the smart personal object: Microsoft's Wrist Net (MSNDirect) watches will launch, introducing SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) to the world. Previous technologies have failed miserably. (Remember the Java Ring?) Since watches are the only piece of personal jewelry that folks will wear consistently (not counting iPods), a smart watch that presents the weather, traffic, instant messages, e-mail, stock quotes, appointments, etc., will be the perfect complement to an increasingly information-cluttered world. For those who can't decide between a PDA, a phone, a Smartphone, or a smart PDA phone, a smart watch for only $179 may be just the ticket. Expect to see lots of .NET Web services pop up around Wrist Net. As a diabetic, I expect to have one that tells my wife my blood sugar level wirelessly ASAP!

• The year of the WS-I: The Web Services Interoperability Organization's Basic Profile will start to take root. It's been out a while, but this will be the year when there will be no excuse for not being WS-I compliant. As chief architect of my company, I'll tell you that we'll be much less likely to do business with vendors that aren't presenting WS-I-compliant services.

• The end of unmanaged business code: Good luck to you if you are still creating new business functionality in VB6 or ASP in 2004. With the introduction of .NET 2.0, there will be simply no good excuse to avoid .NET. Expect to see 90% of all new meaningful projects on Windows to include a .NET component.

John Sharp is a principal technologist at Content Master Ltd., a technical authoring company in the United Kingdom. John has authored Microsoft Visual C# .NET Step By Step, and Microsoft Visual J# .NET.

• The coming year will see the advent of the keyboardless, mouseless, penless computer. The input device will be composed of implants in the tips of the user's fingers that can determine what the user would be typing if a keyboard were present, or where the mouse would be if there were one. (I believe Scott Adams may already be working on a similar idea, although he may be the subject of a Microsoft buyout fairly soon.) The main advantages will be the reduced desk space required and the elimination of sticky keys and gummed-up mouse balls. The main disadvantage: it would be a bad idea to blow your nose or go to the bathroom while the computer is turned on.

• The wireless pen will start to come into its own. This often-overlooked piece of technology will work in almost any environment and does not even require any form of power source or batteries. Users will be able to record messages and take notes using the pen in conjunction with a simple recording sheet. These sheets will be thin, lightweight, and flexible enough to be folded should size become a storage problem. Users will also be able to "transmit" these sheets to each other, although the physical transfer process takes up to three days (depending on whether you use a first- or second-class stamp).

• Sales of the book Visual C# .NET Step By Step (Microsoft Press, Third Edition, updated for Whidbey) will sell a million copies. (I wish!)

• The Microsoft .NET and Linux communities will embrace each other in a heart-warming act of reconciliation and agree that both platforms have much to offer. As a result, Microsoft will announce plans to produce a version of Visual Studio .NET especially for Linux/X-Windows and will donate the source code to GNU for porting to other Unix platforms. Remember, you heard it here first, folks.

Dean Guida is CEO and president of software component maker Infragistics and a member of the .NETDJ editorial board.

• Sixty-five percent of all new development will be on the .NET platform.
• Tablet PC momentum will increase and it will become the preferred device for road warriors.
• WiFi will be a key driver behind the use of laptops instead of desktops for knowledge workers.
• Outsourcing will begin to have a negative ripple effect on the U.S. economy.
• Technology stock IPOs will come back to NASDAQ.
• The number of ASP.NET (aspx) applications will surpass the number of ASP applications on the Web.
• Linux will gain market share in governments and third-world countries.
• Software development will continue to evolve into a more disciplined engineering practice.
• Infragistics will move from being a third-party component vendor to a software tools company.

Tim Huckaby is CEO of InterKnowlogy, a software, infrastructure, and network engineering firm. Tim is a Microsoft Regional Director, Microsoft Partner Advisory Council member, and INETA "rock star" speaker.

I'm a terrible prognosticator. I don't seem to correctly predict anything deep into the future. Here are a couple of my really bad predictions from the past:

• I was the guy who just a few short years ago predicted the Internet's collapse. How in the world could I predict that a little company called Cisco would make a bad thing worse? The Internet would have collapsed if a little company called Cisco didn't make a bad thing worse by inventing the router.

  Do you realize how efficient a telephone call is? If I call from Europe to my home in California, I go 3 maybe 4 switches. Yet if I browse to InterKnowlogy.com, I'm making 40+ router hops. Ridiculous! How broken is that?! Additionally, TCP/IP is an unprotected and inefficient protocol compared to some of the beautiful binary protocols out there. Even the Fax can be called a better protocol than TCP/IP - and it was invented in the 1950s.

• I also predicted the death of HTML. The HTML form submit has to be one of the most broken things I've seen in 20+ years of technology. HTML actually makes me long for JCL - and 20 years ago I really hated JCL. I thought that there was no way software developers would ever accept HTML for any length of time and that resistance would eventually lead to HTML's demise. How wrong I was! It seems we are stuck with HTML forever.

• In early 2000, in the dawn of XML hysteria, I used to caution audiences about using XML as a panacea for all technology woes. "XML is great for transitory data," I used to say. "XML is not a database and should not be used as one." Now, of course, XML is consistently used to function as a database.

  So, it is with a careful and skeptical eye that you should view my predictions for this coming year. But I believe this year will be the dawn of the next-generation application: the smart client. I believe developers and architects alike will realize that the way an application is surfaced is part of the application architecture. An architect must consider the best ways to surface an application depending on the needs of the users of the application. As developers and architects, we have been so jaded by browser-based applications for the past few years (for many legitimate reasons) that we tend to not even consider surfacing an app in any way other than on a browser.

  In many respects .NET has overcome the problems of old (deployment, versioning, etc.) and opened huge opportunity for surfacing applications on user platforms other than the browser. The future looks even better for smart client application development as the infrastructure permeates the client and overcomes current deployment and security weaknesses. As architects, we need to get over the jaded view that surfacing an application in a browser is the sole manner in which applications can be delivered to end users. We need to discuss the many alternative ways to surface an application as a part of its architecture up front as it is designed. This is the year we do just that.