Will’s Blog

Many people have many opinions (in other words, everyone has their own opinion!) about what is going to be the technology for the year.

I’m going to take a different perspective, I want to focus on what technologies I should be looking at in order to prepare myself for next year and the year after.

What’s going to be released in 2006 then? Well, Microsoft have stated that Longhorn is to be released in 2006. So, this year, 2005, I should be looking into pathways to 2006 technologies.

With Longhorn, we will be seeing Indigo, Avalon and the beta version of WinFS should hopefully be out by then as well.

One of the reasons for me to look at what’s coming up, and keeping a close eye on it, is as a developer, you need to know what you should be learning about to be able to provide services to the end user(s) that takes advantage of that.

I also think that Sharepoint is going to grow even further beyond what it has right now. I’m hearing of many companies make use of Sharepoint in their internal network for information sharing. (From memory, the South Australian Treasury Department make use of Sharepoint)

I heard Robert Scoble mention information sharing internally within Microsoft on the Gday World podcast.

Information sharing across internally within organisations is and will be a big thing.

Robert talked about internal blogs at Microsoft, I wonder how many companies would be doing that?

To Cam and Mick, I’m addressing both of you, you want people within companies in Australia to blog. Perhaps you should get them first to try setting up internal ones within their organisations to assist employees to share information with each other. When they see the benefits of it internally, perhaps then, they will start writing external ones themselves at a later date.

(Eg: Get them addicted to blogging, then they will start to explore from there )

Ok, back to technologies i’m looking out for. I mentioned Longhorn, I always read with extra interest any news on Longhorn features, not so much the release dates.

Anyway, two articles i’ve happened to come across and read recently. 1 and 2.

Both articles talk about something called WinOE (Windows Orchestration Engine) which from what I can gather thus far is a workflow management software and framework.

It has a set of XML schemas a set of APIs as well as workflow components for VS.NET 2005.

Since I don’t know much about this WinOE, i’ll just keep doing some more research on it and see what I come up with. Oh, and of course, on Avalon, I’ve downloaded and installed the Avalon CTP, which took quite awhile.

Haven’t really played around with it too much though.

Have downloaded a few samples, so hopefully i’ll have a play with them when I have some time.

[Note: Ok, I know I should probably split this post up, but my mind does wonder sometimes and this is the result!]

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2005 at 11:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.