Just in time to keep a future Visual Studio on the horizon before we actually make landfall on the shores of the new one, Microsoft have done the deed and made their first remarks on Visual Studio 10, part of the platform suite codenamed 'Oslo'. Corporate VP of their Connected Systems Division Robert Wahbe (resembling a smarter version of Statto) made the remarks during his keynote at the the fifth annual Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference on October 30.

Promising a stronger commitment to service oriented architecture and many other buzzwords aside - some of which will most likely have been superceded by its release in time for the first announcement of codename Copenhagen in 2010 - Oslo will include VS 10, .NET 4 (or 4.x where 0 <= x <= 10), Biztalk 6, and the first drop of Hailstorm for Businesses Biztalk Services. So, geeks and gals, it looks at this point that WCF and Workflow are where it'll be at in 2011 or so when this little lot gets officially released.

I wonder how much of the underlying architecture for this will be part of Windows Server 7 or introduced in a service pack for Windows Server 2008? From a developer perspective, it's interesting that it's the business layer paving the way for what will be probably a series of not-quite-blue-sky announcements for Oslo and VS\.NET. Is it that the existing bolt-on stacks for VS2008 (Silverlight, Dynamic Languages, Entity Modelling, ASP.NET MVC, AJAX Futures) already give a good indication of what to expect in the next three or four years for the presentation and the data layers or that Oslo is something MS have been working on for long enough that they can already sketch out the playing field for us?

Given the ratio of buzzwords to substance in this first throw of the dice, let's hope that the very least MS can do in future keynotes on VS 2011 is give it a more exotic codename. Oslo leaves me as cold as the city itself.

Scott may or may not be testing Windows Home Server at the moment and asks what everyone else has beta’d for it to die on you. I developed and co-wrote this book only to have it become irrelevant about three days after it was published. For those with long memories, MS also started something called Chrome which died a death as well. Must have been those Pentium 3’s  it needed to run in those days. Still, it used .x files which in those heightened times of Mulder and Scully was kind of fun.

These days I get to play with nicer pre-release stuff, sans book writing, with due dates in a couple of weeks. No, I won’t say what - not yet anyway.

A slightly old post, but one I couldn't resist flagging up. Hailstorm? Arrrgghh, no!

"Mark Lucovsky left Microsoft today. ... What made him move to Google, a company who competes with Microsoft but in a complete different area? For that, you have to look at what Mark also was: designer at the Hailstorm team. Now, let's enter speculation mode. What if Google hired Mark to architect the all-you'll-ever-need-website/services system for Google, which combines all Google's current and future services? Strange thought? Perhaps, ... "

After a few more weeks writing and production time than originally planned, my latest book, Beginning ASP.NET Databases: From Novice To Professional went to press today. Thanks to Damien for co-writing it. As is the usual way of books with deadlines attached, there's a lot in there that I'm proud of and a few things I probably would have added if I had had the time. Please email me if you'd like a copy to review and I'll be happy to sort you out. Expect to see it in the shops in a few weeks time. You can already pre-order it on Amazon.com and Amazon UK.

So what to write next? Not sure, but it will be something Whidbey. We could revise Web Services Core Reference for MS Press but that hasn't made any money for us in 18 months. Perhaps a 'Beginning Web Services' title including Whidbey\WSE2 taking our cues from Yasser's nice intro article on MSDN. Certainly not a Whidbey book until the final release - it just doesn't make financial sense to start writing a book with only three months shelf-life. Taking the ultimate example of this. I wrote Early Adopter Hailstorm in time for PDC 2001 where it was officially canned. It had a shelflife of three weeks. Copies sold < 1000. Money made = £0. There's scary talk that it might be resurrected. I think I'll let someone else cover it. While I'm working for 3Form, there's much less time to write, so I'll probably concentrate on my GotDotBooks project - a site for .NET writers - for a while, and wait for Whidbey to mature. In the meantime, some small articles on the writing process here to follow.

Argument and counter argument as to whether the geek has died at The Register. Note : why must I hate Microsoft to be a geek? I use their OS, but I dig through their code, find their mistakes and get my stuff working on their machines. Am I some sub-geek simply because I choose not to use a free OS? To quote the Demotivator for this month, ’If you’re not part of the solution, there’s money to be made in prolonging in the problem.’ Only if you’re an MS consultant, which I’m not. Nor am I an MS evangelist. I like my free tools. Web Matrix is looking good for example. The argument for geeks is to shun MS, but that’s bull. Someone has to prove to MS that they should and can live in the same world, whether they like it or not. They can be happily co-existent and inter-communicative with the free OS’s of the world. Ditto to the politicists of geekdom who would rather provide a solution as a slap in the face to Billy Gates than just a solution to the problem.

There’s almost the parallel between sci-fi of the fifties and science today. The ideas of those writers in their heyday are slowly being made reality by the scientists of today, inspired to see if they can make it real. Ditto for most of what MS has achieved. The geeks and hackers of the world have found a challenge to create the same (but not next generation) tools in cleaner, open code. But it’s still MS, IBM, Sun, etc producing the ideas for the next step. Some take, some don’t. Web services have taken, slowly, while HailStorm \ .NET My Services has not, although it won’t be a surprise to see similar ventures from everyone down the road. Likewise, MS has taken the first step to standardize more of the web service world under the guise of its GXA project, and will probably take more flak from it. Still though, the instigator always takes more risks than those who follow and refine. Such is the nature of the role. We don’t have to dislike MS to be a geek - we just have to identify its role. Even Linus Torvalds agrees with that - “If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.“ How universal do you want it? Should I put it in XML tags to make sure it’s compatible with your system?