By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Jun. 9, 2008

• Chart: Product Life-Cycle Phases and Options
• Illustration: Reading Roadmap Diagrams
• Sidebar: .NET Framework Summary

The following an excerpt of a Product 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.

The Directions on Microsoft Developer Platform Roadmap summarizes current and planned versions of Microsoft's most important developer technologies and products. The Roadmap provides a single reference for Microsoft customers and partners who need to answer basic planning questions, such as the following:

• What technologies does Microsoft provide for building the user interface of an application?
• When does support for Visual Studio (VS) 2003 end?
• What are my options for building an Office-based client application?

The information in this report is based on our interpretation of the most credible public sources. Not all future product releases have official names or codenames; for the purposes of this Roadmap, Directions has used version numbers for these products. Microsoft does not endorse this report, and its product plans are subject to change at any time.

Planning for Product Retirements

The life-cycle information provided for past product versions can help organizations prepare for product retirements. Microsoft divides a product's life cycle into phases, the most important of which are Mainstream, Extended, and Online Self-Help. (For more details on the life cycle, see the chart "Product Life-Cycle Phases and Options".)

During the Mainstream phase, Microsoft offers the broadest set of product support options and maintains the product with hotfixes. Service packs are generally released in this phase, but the company might stop releasing service packs for a product well before Mainstream support ends. For products nearing the end of Mainstream support, the company might instead release update rollups, integration-tested packages of selected fixes for the highest-priority bugs and security vulnerabilities. The Mainstream support phase for a product version lasts five years, or until two years after a successor version has shipped, whichever is longer.

In the Extended support phase, which follows the Mainstream phase, Microsoft provides support for a fee (including custom hotfixes, if included in the customer's support contract) and free hotfixes for some security vulnerabilities. However, it does not provide free nonsecurity hotfixes and does not issue further service packs. The Extended support phase lasts five years after the end of Mainstream.

In the final phase, Online Self-Help, little support is available other than information at Microsoft's Web site. The Online Self-Help phase lasts 10 years or more after a product's general availability.

How This Report Is Organized

This report is organized by technology function and includes the following chapters:

"Presentation" covers technologies for creating an application's user interface.

"Data Access" covers technologies for accessing, retrieving, and updating data.

"Web Services and Workflow" covers technologies for creating Web services and for automating business processes.

"Tools and Languages" covers Microsoft's development environments and programming languages.

Many of Microsoft's developer technologies do not ship by themselves but are instead incorporated into other products. For example, the .NET Framework includes several developer technologies, such as the Windows Forms presentation system and the ADO.NET data access API, and itself ships as a component of a variety of Microsoft products, including VS and SQL Server.

For a summary of support dates and key features of various versions of the .NET Framework, which is the ship vehicle for many Microsoft developer technologies, see the sidebar ".NET Framework Summary".

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