Every year I ask everyone I know to try to make some predictions for the following year.  Truthfully, I’ve never gone back and compared my predictions with reality (that would spoil the fun I think).  Well, here are my predictions for 2009.

1. Deep / Long Recession:  2009 will be a year of change in the IT industry, sparked, of course, by the recession that started in 2008.  With every recession we face there will be challenges, but there will also be opportunities.  I predict that there will be a “weeding” out of IT organizations, those who will survive will be the ones who have adapted their practices even before the recession took hold. 
2. Spark of Innovation:  Recessions always get us to think about doing more with less – and I think that this will further spark new ideas on how we can add value to business and industry as a whole. 
3. Head in the Cloud:  Doing more with less, being nimble, cutting operational costs, reducing risks – these are all great reasons why I think cloud services will become much more mainstream.
4. Too Many Damn Social Network and Social Network Aggregators:  2008 truly birthed social networking (I remember, this was something I did predict).  Social networking has proliferated throughout our societies entire online life – from our computers, to our mobile devices, and of course into the world of online gaming.  Facebook has proven to be a catalyst for them all – Twitter has truly taken hold – and there are dozens of others such as Ping.fm that can be used to help broadcast our lives out into the ether like never before.  These types of communities will reach a turning point this year.
5. SharePoint 2010 will be announced:  (I’m speculating here folks) SharePoint will go through another revolutionary change – just as it has done with every release.  SharePoint will bring not only advances in document management but it will begin to truly leverage Silverlight from a user experience perspective.  I predict that Microsoft will also announce much of what we see in the new online Live services down into the SharePoint space – allowing organizations to have Micro-social networks much easier than we can today with the product.  I also believe that SharePoint will be “meshafied” – meaning, we should be able to experience SharePoint leveraging offline/synchronization functionality that mesh and the synchronization framework have. 
6. Microsoft Groove will morph:… into the “meshafied” version of SharePoint.  We will have offline content of virtually all aspects of SharePoint – from the social network experience to document and list management. 
7. Azurameshafication: Microsoft Azure offers cloud solutions, and many organizations will start to provide services using these core services.  That’s a given, however, I also predict that Microsoft Mesh will play a much larger role and savvy organizations will think long and hard about coupling a fantastic online experience with a P2P/Offline experience.
8. 100 Gb of Online Storage for the World:  Today SkyDrive gives us 25gigs of free online space.  I predict that throughout the year, as the demand for cloud services increases, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon will jump frog each other providing more and more free online storage until each of us can get up to 100 GB of storage for free.
9. Explosion of User Experience:  Silverlight 2.0 now makes it more realistic to build business applications outside of the traditional ASP.NET/WPF/Winform boundaries.  Today a lot of the Silverlight controls for business applications look very similar to Winform control – and I think in 2009 those organizations who will truly push these boundaries of user experience controls will truly make the biggest influence on how the world works.  I predict 1 or 2 vendors who will offer amazingly innovative and useful Silverlight controls that will allow us to express business value in ways we haven’t seen today.
10. Windows 7 Hype:  I believe that Windows 7 will have a great deal more hype.  Software vendors will be biting at the bit trying to think of ways of providing multi-touch user experiences to their apps (see prediction #9).  Microsoft will announce limited multi-touch functionality to Vista SP3 scheduled  to be released the late part of 2009 or early 2010.
11. Microsoft to announce Office 2010 Live will be pay per use:  I predict that Microsoft announce that they will give away base functionality for Office Live 14, and also provide greater functionality/scale/features/no-adverts to those willing to pay incrementally on either a pay per use model or a monthly subscription model.

Let me know what you think by posting your own predictions and linking to mine! 

Happy New Year everyone! 

A few years ago, I remember speaking to the VSTS team about community.  It was a formal presentation arranged by one of the old team members – where I was to talk about the importance of community support and how to win the hearts and minds of developers – and ultimately customers.  I’m actually not claiming that I had anything to do with this – but embracing community is exactly what the VSTS team have been doing.

Over the years blogging has become an important tool for communication and education.  In fact, I used to blog a LOT regarding VSTS but decided to stop after I saw that my blog was, in fact, second hand, to the blogs maintained by the VSTS team. 

I was expecting this a bit sooner – better late than never – however, you can now follow the VSTS team on Twitter (my new social addiction it seems).  Personally, I’m at the point where I need a better Twitter aggregator.  Any suggestions?

I really enjoy being a Microsoft Regional Director and an MVP for Team System, however, I don’t think I would enjoy it as much if the VSTS team wasn’t as good as they are.  They ABSOLUTELY get it!  They have been nothing but open and engaging with “us” (the community at large) and work to continually add value to consumers of their product base on the feedback they hear (yes, they actually listen).

A great example of this is the Team System Power Tools – which the VSTS team release “out of stream” – working to provide customers value early and often without having for us to wait for service packs and major releases.  The latest example of this is detailed on Brian Harry’s blog…

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/10/01/preview-of-the-next-tfs-power-tools-release.aspx

If you are a software vendor this practice is absolutely something you should consider adopting.  First – listen to your customers and those who aren’t your customers (because they aren’t your customer for a very good reason).  Next, don’t rely on Big Harry Audacious Releases to solve problems.  Trickle out the value, get feedback early and often, work this value back into the core product and the world will be a happy place.

Of course, none of this works if you are a software consulting company where value is more determined by the contract you are bound to… but I’m not bitter.

I normally let the product groups blog about their announcements – they do a much better job at blogging anyway.. however, I wanted to make sure that everyone is going to check out Channel9 this week as there is some great content coming.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Week-on-Channel-9/

Stay tuned to http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/ for all of the action!

Some of the 3d views in Live Earth are stunning (especially if you live in a major US city).    Mark Brown talks about the camera technology that sits behind it.  Very cool.

http://blogs.msdn.com/markbrown/archive/2008/05/23/cnet-article-on-google-capturing-3d-data.aspx

A bit about the cameral

216 mega-pixels with a panchromatic image size of 14,430 x 9,420 pixels, capturing data at over 3 GBits/sec, 13 CCD's - 7 pan and 4 color (RGB + Near IR) and 14 CPU's to process the raw images and data in real-time. The data units for the camera hold 1.7TB, enough for about 4,700 images

How the heck can I get me one of those 216 Mega-pixel cameras?  I'm sure in 15 years Canon will come out with a consumer model ;-)

Over the next few weeks, Imaginet will be hosting a series of public Webcasts on various different topics...The first of this series is Steve Porter on process template customization for Team System.

Here are a few more Webcasts we're putting on:

http://www.imaginets.com/news--events/spring-2008-webcast-series.aspx

Windows Communication Service Gateways with C#3.0 and Linq-To-SQL
An overview of a simple Gateway data accessing pattern exposed via WCF, using LinqToSql for data access. Also includes a brief look into handy uses of new C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 features including Lambda expressions, LinqToEntities, and more.
May 28 - 2008
https://www119.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=0ggc1605gzxfjkkf&FromPublicUrl=1

NHibernate: An Entry-Level Primer
A look into getting started creating Data Access Layers with NHibernate.
June 25 2008
https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=cjqnm4lgfrcz3wr9

Customizing Team System Process Templates
Learn how to customize Team System's process templates to allow you to align your organization's unique processes to those processes managed by the Team Foundation Server.
May 14 - 2008
https://www119.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=73fdz3q11vj4s4hl&FromPublicUrl=1

Dependency Injection with StructureMap
Learn how to decouple your application and drive it towards a cleaner and more testable design by using dependency injection.
June 18 - 2008
https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=g22s2bs6wzh759g7

Creating Real world applications with CSLA 3.5
I'll do a quick walkthrough of creating a Point of Sale system using Parent-Child-Grandchild relationship using the new features of CSLA 3.5. These include Linq-to-SQL, better property management and persistence management through the chain.
July 2 - 2008
https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=l6p0t81q6lm23pml

Introduction to Software Factories
This web cast will introduce developers to Software Factories.  We'll focus specifically on those published by Microsoft, including the Web Client Software Factory, the Smart Client Software Factory, and the Services Software Factory.  We'll demo how the factories work and examine what they produce.
May 21 - 2008
https://www119.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=8gprzl6j2tz2skv5&FromPublicUrl=1

Customizing Software Factories
This Webcast will walk developers through what is involved in customizing the software factories published by Microsoft. We'll discuss the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) and the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX), and will discuss the dos, don'ts, and pain points involved in working with these technologies.
Familiarity with Software Factories is recommended.
June 11 - 2008
https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=699ps56b6hdjqx90

MVC vs MVP smackdown
This Webcast will compare and contrast 2 presentation layer design patterns, the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern being baked into the the ASP.NET MVC Framework and the Model View Presenter (MVP) design pattern that is currently baked into the Microsoft Software Factories.  What's the difference? Which is better?  Find out!
July 9 - 2008
https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=dnr4zf5th6xp8cnl

Testing out the MVC: Routing
One of the most difficult parts of an application to test is the User Interface.  With the impending release of the ASP.NET MVC framework, this will become a lot easier for web based applications.  This webcast will take a Test Driven approach to exploring the new MVC Framework focusing on the URL Routing.
June 4 - 2008
https://www119.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=j8l7d1rddtq7sjm3&FromPublicUrl=1

Creating a Web Video Player Using Silverlight
A brief introduction to creating silverlight applications for websites, and a demo of creating a video player.
July 16 - 2008
https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000153370/Registration.aspx?pageName=tb930khj51nfpgp2

I noticed today that live.com has changed.  My first experience - silly fast!  I was impressed.  My second experience was impressive as well - I performed a vanity video search - up popped a few results - simply hover your mouse over the video thumbnail - and it started playing.  That feature actually gave me a startle, since I wasn't expecting it and all of a sudden my computer was talking to me.

Requirements Management is something very near to my heart. So, is Team System.  Wouldn't you know that there is now a white paper out from Microsoft that talks about both!!!

Nice....

https://www.foldershare.com/

Just heard that Ray Ozzie will also be talking at Mix this year.  If you don't know, Ray Ozzie is Microsoft's Chief Architect - taking over after Bill Gates. I've followed Ray's career for a very long time - since the days of Lotus Notes (which he created) and Groove (which is still ahead of its time... even though Microsoft has done absolutely nothing with the product since they purchased it - which is sad).

I have to admit, Ray Ozzie isn't the most exciting presenter in the lineup - however, I think along with Guthrie, he'll be the most profound.  With the speakers that they have lined up - I truly hope Microsoft drops some huge news on our laps...something that will really blow us away and keep us excited.