The future of development on Microsoft servers
There's a question about the future floating around a private ASPInsiders list, I thought I'd post my response publicly and invite everyone to share their own thoughts. It's not often I can write about SharePoint, ASP.Net, and Lazy Programming all at once.
Question:
I was wondering what the next big paradigm shift is going to be as far as programming. It seems about every 6-9yrs or so MS redefines the programming paradigm.
We saw this from 3.11 to Win95/COM/ASP.
From 95-00/01 we saw the CLR/.NET.
From the CLR/.NET to ?????
What's next?
One Answer:
My bet would be SharePoint (MOSS) melting from what it is now into a ubiquitous application platform.
With the current version of .Net, the code didn’t disappear, it became configuration of standard controls. But really, “configuration of controls” is the same as saying “provide parameters to controls” – and my argument has always been that coding is configuration too. As we get better at making appropriate objects to work with (e.g. .Net, Rails), we can encapsulate these objects and forget to some degree how they work. All learning follows this pattern – learn the mechanics, internalize the mechanics, and then forget the mechanics and simply express. Our industry behaves the same as it matures.
From a development point of view, where could we use better encapsulation? I’d like to see better visualization of entire applications and systems. I’d like to see better visualization tools for the real-time monitoring of applications(IIS particularly, but for clusters and load-balancing and a hundred other places too.
After that I’d expect more visual tools for process flow, though I personally prefer what we have now to something that would mix dragging and typing – task switching – even more. This is why I hate UML functionality in Visio. So for code design, visualization at a granular level sucks, but for entire apps and systems, and especially the modeling and monitoring of those systems, I want more visualization.
But back to MOSS. It’s central to just about everything MSFT is doing. Throughout 2006 year I expect IS shops will understand the potential of MOSS 2007, and it will become a standard application hub for corporate development.
Where does ASP.Net fit? I expect ASP.Net will expand its role as the presentation layer for MOSS data and services, which now includes web content management, search, records management, document management, and legacy integration. ASP.Net will get even better at providing presentation services for other platform services too – e.g. database, communication, authorization, search, media, directory.
But mostly, ASP.Net is what we’ll keep using for business logic, aka the custom bits where cookie cutters just don’t meet requirements. We’ll also use it to build the logic that connects proprietary systems and those without a critical mass to justify commercial adapters. We’ll use it to build hooks into proprietary apps so they can participate in Windows Workflow Foundation logic, and yes you’ll be able to plug in and use that code for SharePoint workflow too.
So it’s not so much an evolution of the platform or another CLR, it’s the continued encapsulation of the bits we work with, so we can work with those bits at ever higher altitudes. The next layer of encapsulation just happens to look a lot like MOSS 2007.