OK, now what?

Over the past year, there has been a lot of "stuff" happening in the .NET world. My primary areas on interest (in no particular order) are:

• BizTalk
• Team Foundation Server (customizing and extending)
• WCF (and Service Factory)
• WF
• LINQ/DLINQ

That's kind of a lot to cover. To help get a handle on it all, I've kind of grouped BizTalk, WCF and WF into a single "thing" since they are all very much related to each other. WF is built on BizTalk technology and BizTalk is being positioned by Microsoft as their SOA platform, which makes WCF a great compliment to it. Also, these are all developer related technologies that are all available (in some form or another) today.

LINQ/DLINQ are cool, but still in a very preliminary form. To be honest, when I first looked at these, I thought there were interesting, but I didn't really get excited about them. Recently, I've been reading some blog entries by Sahil Malik where he's been doing some very cool demos of what you can do with this stuff. It looks like it might be something that can complete with persistence frameworks like nHibernate. As cool as nHibernate is, the idea of a native solution baked into the .NET platform, not to mention no more XML mapping files, is very appealing. We'll have to see where this goes.

The Team Foundation Server stuff is cool, but it's mostly "implementing methodology"" type stuff, and once you get one custom project guidance, a few custom check-in policies and some extensions to MS-build under your belt, it sort of becomes a "been there, done that" sort of thing.

Currently I have a client who is not an "early-adopter", which they are comfortable with. However, they recognize the need, given their situation, to jump in with .NET 3.0 (specifically WCF) and Team Foundation Server. I’ve also spoken to them about moving to BizTalk since they already own a license and it is much more reliable, feature rich and user-friendly than their current solution and they are very excited about this possibility as well. What I'm looking forward most of all is seeing how a large, conservative shop will adjust moving to several new technologies (almost simultaneously) and moving to Feature Driven Development, which they've also asked for my help with.

So, as far as .NET posts, I'll have some WCF, TFS and FDD stuff coming pretty soon.

But don't worry; there is still plenty of other non-work stuff to blog about. Like, what’s up with this new Bobby Flay show"Throwdown?" Has he gotten tired of beating up on people on "Iron Chef" that he now has to go embarrass people in their own homes? So, is this the culinary equivalent of him knocking on someone’s door and sucker-punching them when they answer? Doesn't he have a restaurant to run or something...