In December, Michael Arrington had a post that held a contest to win a copy of 'The Big Switch' by Nick Carr of 'Does IT Matter' fame. It talks about computing services becoming a utility. I won a copy by giving my thoughts on the topic.
It was a fast read, provided some background on the history of electric utilities and then makes the parallel with computing services. Corporate infrastructure departments should give it a gander. His theory makes sense as the foundation is already being laid. Smaller shops are already there.
One interesting note - he claims Bill Gates' time has come and gone. I can see that and I guess with the impending changing of the guard at Microsoft, so does Bill.
Anyway, its an interesting book.
I have just read Keith Harvey's post Slow Down Microsoft, I Can't Take It! about the pace the development of .Net technologies. He says it's not so bad but wow, my head hurts.
With the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 we have several new things to play with, in addition to the CTPs for MVC, Entity Framework, Astoria plus whatever else I have heard about and can't think of at the moment.
LINQ, with all of its flavors is a monster. Thanks to Scott Guthrie for his tutorials here and here. What is going to be interesting with LINQ is to see how and when Oracle supports it, but I heard its coming.
So here we go again. I can't master it all, heck, I can't even use it all, but for now the goal is to gain a decent understanding of it so I'll know its there for a deeper dive when I start my next project.
UPDATE As Robert pointed out in the comments, I forgot Silverlight. So, while I am at it - WCF which I work with, WPF which I read a book about, WF which I ran a few tutorials for, CardSpace an on an on an on!