Challenges and Future Directions

The .NET Framework is a critical piece of Microsoft’s developer strategy, and version 3.0 includes a number of important new features, including the ability to create better UIs and support for emerging Web services standards. But the update is shipping without the usual set of developer tools and comes at a time when the company is facing renewed competition for developers. Most notably, Adobe is taking aggressive steps to extend its Portable Document Format (PDF) and Flash technologies into a full-fledged developer platform.

Waiting for Visual Studio “Orcas”

Past releases of the .NET Framework have shipped with immediate support from Visual Studio. But this time around, Visual Studio (VS) is lagging the Framework and the “Orcas” release isn’t due until sometime in 2007. Developers have two options: use VS 2005 to build .NET Framework 3.0 applications, or use some of the prerelease tools Microsoft expects to provide in the interim.

In some cases, Microsoft is providing add-ons to VS 2005 to target the new version of the Framework, but in other cases, using VS 2005 will be more difficult: for example, it will be harder to edit a XAML file with a text editor than with a visual design tool.