Mary Branscombe

Vista - Like it or loathe it, Vista changes things for software development because applications can’t blindly run as admin any more and developers can’t expect to get away with it. Learn to create desktop apps that run as a standard user or get used to Vista virtualising you. While you’re at it, take advantage of WCF and Aero; they’ll be in a lot of copies of XP too.

Silverlight - The first version is a me-too Flash competitor, but Silverlight 1.1 gives you a way to build cross-platform rich internet applications with real languages; .NET controls, XAML interfaces, LINQ for data. This isn’t a Flash killer – it’s a JavaScript killer. You can develop applications in Python and Ruby for Firefox and Safari – with a Microsoft technology.

Quad core and triple core - Triple core from AMD means that they’re having yield problems but they’re sticking with multi-core. Quad core means you have to stop expecting a faster processor to fix your programming mistakes and learn to create parallelisable distributable algorithms. In five years time you’ll have 80 cores, maybe 60 of which run standard code – at 1/80th the power and speed budget of a dual-core chip; how are you going to code for that?

Social networks - Open Social is neither open nor social, but like the Facebook platform and the iPhone it does reinforce the interest in widgets and blinged-up sites and the shift from shareware to ad-supported software that doesn’t get categorized as spyware. Someone will pay for a slideshow and a simple game – probably more than they’d pay for real code that did something useful. Business models matter as much as good code if programming is a business not a hobby.

Robotics is real - We’ve had a robot cleaning the floor for a couple of years now, and last year iRobot put out the Create – a Roomba without the vacuum for building hobby robots. Now Microsoft Robotics Studio means that developing a robot isn’t all about the soldering and you don’t have to literally re-invent the wheel and the gears every time. You can take standard physical components and control them with code you write in a familiar environment. Hobbyists, university students and programmers can write code to reach out and touch the physical world.

Andrew Shorten

AIR - The biggest development in 2007 is Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). With this we’ve enabled web designers and developers to take their current browser-based applications, written in HTML, Ajax, Flex or Flash and bring those to the desktop - creating a new class of web-enabled desktop application. This is incredibly exciting, as it redefines who can build desktop applications and provides new opportunities for organisations to engage with customers.

Flex 3 - Flex is a free framework for delivering browser and desktop-based Rich Internet Applications and earlier in 2007 we released Flex 3 and open sourced the framework and associated SDK. As a result we’ve seen a huge increase in both the adoption of Flex and the number of applications that leverage Flash Player and AIR to deliver compelling, engaging and interactive user experiences. This is changing people’s expectations as to the what the Internet can offer.

RIA - 2007 has been the year of the Rich Internet Application - we’ve seen renewed focus on the quality of the user experience as part of web application development and validation as to the importance of this market going forward with Microsoft and Sun announcing technologies which sit alongside the Ajax and Flex frameworks available today. Bringing designers and developers closer has become increasingly important and whilst there have been improvements we’ll continue to see innovation in the space.

iPhone - The launch of the iPhone has clearly demonstrated customer demand for software that delivers a compelling user experience. The iPhone user interface is a pleasure to use and oozes quality, combining interactivity, simplicity, movement and high-fidelity graphics to provide a responsive and consistent experience that people WANT to use. It has redefined our expectations for mobile computing.

Web super-brands - Another year and another set of web brands which have catapulted into the mainstream, with Facebook, Twitter and Pownce (to name just a few) showing how software changes the way people interact, communicate and express themselves. For software developers, the success of an online service, such as Facebook, can alter the target platforms upon which we need to deploy applications and so the need to monitor the market and predict where the user-base will be is more important than ever.

marc hoffman

The Year of Apple - It might just be my imagination, but I believe 2007 will be remembered as the year where the Mac started to matter, and came out of the niche as the device "those creative types" use. Everywhere you look (and that includes yours truly), Windows users are getting MacBooks (if only because they look pretty and can run Vista as a fallback) and are shocked to find they actually enjoy Mac OS X. Granted, even with Leopard and the new Xcode 3, the platform still has a long way to go to be as attractive a target for software developers as it already is for software users, but if Apple and tool vendors play their cards right, the Mac could be the next big thing…

The King is Dead – Long Live the King! - One had almost given up hope, but after a continuous and reliable flow of duds, the newly spun off CodeGear née Borland finally released Delphi 2007, a product worthy of the name. It brought back the stability and RAD development approach that once made Delphi the tool of choice for thousands of developers and, frankly, is once again the best tool for unmanaged Windows development.

Howard Fosdick

Free DB Management Systems - Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft released free versions of their database management systems in 2007 in response to market pressure from open software database vendors like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For the first time ever, the user community can download and develop with free versions of Oracle, DB2, and SQLServer. These products are limited in terms of how many processors they support and the size of the databases they support are in order to distinguish them from the commercial versions of the vendors’ database products.

Open Source Databases - The open source databases are maturing into products that are used across all kinds of database applications in all sizes of company. This continues a trend that is culminating in true integration of open source databases into the business community.

The Challenge To Windows - The Wintel monopoly continues to slip as products like Linux and OpenOffice follow Apache ever deeper into the computing mainstream. Especially outside the U.S., Linux and open source stacks are penetrating the personal computer base.

The End of the ‘Upgrade Culture’? - The ability of the vendor community to force product upgrades slips ever further, as many companies and individuals discover they can work productively with products that are not up-to-the-minute. Companies and individuals increasingly find that they can perform common computing tasks like word processing and spreadsheets without upgrading to dual-core Pentiums running Vista and Office 2007. A new attitude towards lock-step upgrades is taking hold as many find their three or four year old computer can still do everything they it need to do. New computers and software products like Vista and Office 2007 increasingly come into organizations in the time frame decided by those organizations, rather than by vendors.

Jason Vokes

iPhone - I pined the demise of my third Sony Ericsson P900 and took a company Windows Mobile phone, which I have struggled with for about a year now. Even though it boasted a nice slidey keyboard and mini-office type capability. I found the O/S clumsy, slow and, infuriatingly, on occasions the thing would either not make or take a call when prompted…aaah! Then my boss shows me this new phone of his…. an iPhone. It has taken me a couple of months (and international releases) to succumb, but it’s just been the best move. It’s one of those technology implementations that gave me the wow! factor - and hey, I can even make phone calls on it when I want to! Can’t wait for the developer kit slated for early ’08 I hear.

Vista - Cannot ignore that through the year Microsoft Vista has been pre-loaded, reloaded, unloaded and offloaded to various degrees. Don’t get me wrong it is all too easy to take a pop at them, but the thing does look good, and has great sounding security features. Vista did really overload the generation of laptops that our field engineers had at the time. Enter an opportunity for hardware vendor upgrades. It has also been a source of intellectual and commercial endeavour for CodeGear, as we released the first IDEs designed to develop for and run on Vista with Delphi 2007 and C++Builder 2007 in Q1. The team integrated capability into the Visual Component Library (VCL) with the aim of seamless XP-through-to-Vista feature support.

Ian Moulster

Software Plus Services - In 2008 we’re likely to see an increasing number of applications and software products moving towards a software + services model. This will avoid the polarising choice of ‘all on the cloud’ (SaaS) or ‘all on the client’ to a middle ground that allows customers to choose the architecture that is most appropriate for them. This approach could be seen as a logical next step for the IT industry which moved from monolithic mainframe applications in the ‘70s, to a client-server model in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, to fully hosted ‘in the cloud’ applications such as SaaS and Utility Computing in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and is now entering a new stage of software + services. We’ve already seen this shift beginning in 2007 and it is likely to accelerate in 2008, driven by three significant factors:

 1) The increasing availability of application features as services accessed via the Internet and typified by Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and mash-ups.
 2) The growing customer demand for richer applications that provide a high level of usability, even while not connected to the network, along with an increasing consumer appetite for services and mash-ups that use the services in new ways.
 3) The increasing range of devices that need to surface applications and data, and experiences that take full advantage of the computing power of the end points

These factors represent both a ‘pull’ from customers who are demanding more richness and flexibility than can be delivered via a web browser and a ‘push’ from application vendors who need to provide differentiated offerings and meet customer needs.

Examples of this shift are numerous, examples include Google Gears, Adobe Air, eBay Desktop, Apple’s iTunes and of course the numerous Microsoft offerings such as Exchange, Office Live Workspaces, Microsoft CRM, the Microsoft Sync Framework and even Xbox Live.

John Allwright

Silverlight - We expect that 2008 will see the full vision and potential for Silverlight emerge as version 1.1 is launched with a cross-platform .NET runtime enabling developers to write Visual Basic or any of the other 50+ supported languages in the browser. Widespread end user adoption of the Silverlight plug-in combined with high-profile adoption by end customers and Web agencies will bring Silverlight into the mainstream as a standard technology for enhancing user experience and delivering Rich Internet Applications on the web and mobile devices.

Microsoft Expression Studio version 2 - This will give designers the tools to create a new generation of user experiences with integrated support for Web Standards (CSS, XHTML) as well as popular scripting languages (ASP.NET, PHP, AJAX) and rich media and interactivity (Silverlight). Interoperability with developers using Visual Studio 2008 will simplify the designer-developer workflow delivering results faster and more faithful to the original creative vision than is possible with current technologies.

Mark Quirk

Silverlight - For some time we’ve been seeing a growth of media and rich content applications available via the internet. With new rivals to the Adobe Flash player such as Microsoft’s Silverlight we expect that consumers with broadband will be in for a great year. The buzz created by the availability of tools to create and implement rich interactive content will lead to ever improving end user experiences. Ajax based applications are pretty common now, but to date the primary way users have witnessed rich content online has been through advertising or website home pages that state ‘This site requires Flash’ where many of us choose not to click ‘Enter site’. A well designed site that combines the best of HTML with the rich application functionality of a plug-in like Silverlight can genuinely provide a better user experience, something where users will start to expect a better, more flexible experience on the web.

.NET 3.5 and Beyond - We also foresee a number of developments around data and how we interact with it. Microsoft has recently released language independent query (Linq) in .NET Framework 3.5 and 2008 will see the release of Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework which allows the abstraction of complex data models. Data services for the web (codenamed ‘Astoria’) will provide live access to data over HTTP methods, Get, Put etc. Finally the release of SQL Server 2008 will add spatial data awareness and continue to improve the way users can mine data and utilise it to provide business intelligence.

Huw Collingbourne

Vista - I must admit to being under impressed by Windows Vista. I have already disabled three of its big new features: the sidebar (I don’t need it), the Aero 3D graphics (they slow down some operations in Adobe Fireworks to such a degree that it becomes unusable) and the User Account Control (which is meant to improve security but often does so in an incredibly annoying way by nagging me whenever I try to do perfectly legitimate operations such as opening or installing applications). In short, I’m trying to make it as much like XP as possible...

Microsoft v Adobe - In my view, some of the more interesting things happening at Microsoft this year have been aimed at two of its big rivals - Adobe and Eclipse. Adobe’s domination of certain areas of Internet related development has increased since its acquisition of Macromedia. Adobe now has a formidable range of Web development tools and technologies such as Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash and FlexBuilder. Microsoft launched a credible challenge to Dreamweaver with its new Expression Web application and the company is gradually building up to an all-out assault on Flash/Flex with its Silverlight technology for Flash-like graphics. This will eventually be programmable using a range of languages including Visual Basic, JavaScript, Python and Ruby.

Microsoft v Eclipse - Microsoft’s attack on Eclipse — the open source framework upon which underpins a number of IDEs including Adobe’s FlexBuilder - takes the form of the recently released Visual Studio Shell. This gives developers the chance to release their tools and languages inside a ‘free’ copy of the Visual Studio environment. Speaking as someone whose company develops a Ruby IDE for Visual Studio, I have to say that this is tremendous news - in fact, as far as we are concerned, this is by far the best news of the year!

Dermot Hogan

The Year of Linux! - The good news: Linux market share in servers has increased from 12% to 13%. The bad news: Windows Server 2003 has increased from 34% to over 38% . Hmmm...

More good news: Dell has sold 40,000 Linux pre-installed machines this quarter! And some bad news: Dell ships about 10 million Windows PCs per quarter. Let’s see – that gives Linux 0.4 percent of the market. I’m constantly amazed just how much noise Linux makes given its relative size.

As the admirable Steve Jobs puts it: “You’ve had sixteen years to try and build a desktop operating system, and you still can’t get your s**t together. Nobody wants your software. It’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s yours. Because trust me, if you truly developed a kick-ass OS with tens of thousands of drivers and easy installation and reliable performance, you’d be winning. But you’re not. Firefox caught on, right? Why? Because it rocked.”

IronRuby - Early days yet, but Microsoft has finally seen the light – not everything has to be wall-to-wall C++, C# or VB. John Lam and his team are doing great stuff in Seattle producing a fast, light .NET/CLR based Ruby for Windows. Dynamic languages look to becoming part of the mainstream instead of an obscure interest.

Vista - And we waited six years for this? I really can’t think of a single good reason for anyone wanting to use Vista. I’ve turned off Aero (too unstable and it’s sloooow), the User Account Control (gets in the way – and I really do not ever, ever, open 419 e-mails or visit dodgy websites, thank you) and set my desktop back to Windows Classic – I happen to like it. As for the Vista backup program – it’s unspeakable.