Andrew Stopford's Weblog

A look ahead at 2005

Looking back at last years post on 2004 there is so much I did'nt manage to do and so much I did instead. Finding the time to do it all is near impossible. Getting married dominated my year and I am very glad for it :)

• Whidbey, Burton and Yukon: Going to rock 2005. For my part Burton and the Whidbey addtion of Rotor will rock. Can't wait.
• Testing, Build and Deploy: Loved working on this and looking foward to more in 2005. More on my own ideas on a build system later in 2005. Looking to do more with WIX and NSIS and some mad ideas around them later in 2005.
• Learn something new: I am great believer in that if you work your brain in different ways you will help improve different areas. For 2005 I would like to learn something not releated to my professional field, I have interests in Physics and Cognitive Biology. So for 2005 I am aiming to invest more in these fields.
• Patterns: Learn them, use them, extend them. My chant for 2005.

and onto my predictions for 2005, Scoble and Don have them so I thought I would have a go :)

1. Functional languages have had some fun on the CLR. 2005 will be the year of the dynamic languages with Perl, Ruby and PHP all following in IronPythons footsteps. O'Reilly will hold a summit with the runtime teams from MS, Mono and the language camps and some major contributions will come from that summit.
2. but not before Parrot shows them the way and takes a sizeable chunk of the dynamic language market. 2005 will see Parrot reach a high level and the PHP folks announcing a formal switch to it.
3. MSBuild will run fully on 1.1 and SDC Build Tools will retire.
4. The unit testing framework in burton will be made available standalone from TS and available to all versions of Whidbey.
5. MbUnit will go opensource and rule the world.
6. CruiseControl will reach 1.0 (gotta happen its so close :) and will add several features to better support MbUnit and the code coverage tools.
7. A major online retailer will join Amazon and EBay in the WS provider space.
8. RIA's will finally get deep into the .NET space and XAML will see a server product.