Dec. 2004                             Purchase a copy of this 28 page report

Below is an excerpt of a roadmap report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

C O N T E N T S:

Executive Summary [Free]

This report provides a roadmap to existing and future Microsoft developer technologies—developer tools and APIs—that are likely to be used by corporate developers and ISVs

Introduction [Free]

Understanding Microsoft's developer technology roadmap can help corporate and commercial developers avoid mistakes that could lead to premature obsolescence or costly rewrites

Visual Basic 2005

2005 marks the end of Mainstream support for Visual Basic (VB) 6.0, the last version to support Microsoft’s classic VB programming environment, and also brings the introduction of VB 2005, the third version of VB for the .NET platform

Office and Smart Clients

Developers building Office solutions must choose between the traditional Visual Basic for Applications environment that ships in the product and three overlapping options based on the .NET Framework

Web Development

ASP.NET has become Microsoft’s strategic Web development API and the replacement for a somewhat bewildering array of technologies and APIs

ISVs and Visual C++

Visual C++ 2005, currently in beta, highlights two major themes of the product roadmap: making C++ better for developing .NET applications and simultaneously increasing support for ANSI C++ standards

Future Directions

Developers who want an early start will have to target WinFX and Longhorn using Visual Studio 2005, although it lacks some of the tools that would make development easier for corporate developers

Resources

Additional resources for .NET Framework, Visual Studio 2005, InfoPath and Office 2003, Information Bridge Framework, ASP.NET 2.0, C++/CLI , Longhorn and WinFX, and SQL Server