This report provides a roadmap to key Microsoft developer technologies—both developer tools and APIs—that are likely to be used by corporate developers and ISVs. Both corporate and commercial developers need to understand this roadmap to avoid mistakes that could lead to premature obsolescence or costly rewrites.

The next major event on Microsoft's developer roadmap is the release of the Visual Studio 2005 integrated development environment (IDE), expected in mid-2005. This release of the IDE will be the third since the initial release of the .NET Framework in 2000 that marked a fundamental redesign of the company's APIs to markedly improve the reliability and security of Windows applications. The 2005 release will deliver a more mature .NET Framework and tools especially needed by corporate developers.

However mature the .NET Framework might be, migration remains a thorny problem. In some cases, developers may be able to incorporate pieces of .NET code into their existing applications, but in others starting over from scratch may prove more efficient. In addition, for some types of applications, such as corporate applications built on Office, there is more than one possible migration path.

This report provides a roadmap and explains migration paths for the following Microsoft developer technologies:

• Visual Basic (VB) and its associated APIs and tools
• The Office development platforms used to build smart client applications
• ASP.NET and other Web application components
• Visual C++ and other tools and APIs used by ISVs.

This report does not cover all of Microsoft's APIs—because building extensibility into its products is such a key part of Microsoft’s overall strategy, virtually every product the company produces has an API, making it impossible for any single report to cover every API. Similarly, although almost every corporate application involves a database, the query language and server-side APIs of SQL Server are not covered in this report. Details on the roadmaps for SQL Server and many other products can be found in the Directions on Microsoft Enterprise Software Roadmap.

Finally, this report focuses on applications: it does not cover administrative scripting and other scripting tools Microsoft provides to help administrators maintain their systems, even though some of them use the same basic scripting languages as ASP.NET.

How This Report Is Organized

This report is organized in two main sections: one devoted to technologies primarily used by corporate developers—Visual Basic, Office, and ASP.NET (Microsoft’s Web application platform)—and one devoted to a technology used by ISVs—Visual C++. Within each chapter, this report gives an overview of the technology, explains how the move to the .NET Framework affects it, and highlights the next step along the roadmap.

Finally, in "Future Directions," this report looks at what is coming after the 2005 releases and why Microsoft might have trouble delivering on its announced schedule.

The "Resources" section lists past Directions on Microsoft reports and useful Microsoft Web pages about particular products and versions. The Directions reports appeared in our weekly news analysis Web postings, our monthly Update, or as separate Research Reports. All of these sources are a good starting point for further research on a product, and they list additional resources at Microsoft and elsewhere.