Thursday, March 28, 2024

A Tarot Reading for Techies and Developers: 2010

Like everyone else, techies like to get a glimpse of the upcoming year, even if it is merely guesses based on hunches, news tidbits and ongoing trends. Andrew Brust has done just that in his latest blog at Redmond Developer News, and his predictions, if you can call them that, may be the closest thing you’ll get to a tarot reading for tech lovers.

Android will continie to be a growing, if not dominating force. Although it has done moderately well thus far, with the upcoming 2.1 release of the OS which will ship with their Nexus smart phone in the next months through the Google web store in the US without service for $529 or starting at $179 with a two-year contract from T-Mobile USA. Android 2.1, a version of the platform’s Eclair software, offers advanced applications and features including Google Maps Navigation, email, multiple Gmail accounts, universal inbox and Exchange support, Phone book and access to more than 18,000 applications.
Brust contends that “2010 will be a big year for the Google mobile phone platform.”

On the Microsoft front, Windows Home Server will continue to grow, with form factors available from not only HP, but also Asus, Acer, Lenovo and others. As a home network backup product, it’s got serious potential, but with Media Center integration and Atom-based WHS machines on the rise, lower costs make it a strong selling point.

Also while speaking of Microsoft, .NET 4+ will continue to impress developers and is maturing at a rate thus far unheard of. Newer functionality such as Reactive Extensions and Parallel Extensions, along with ASP.NET MVC 2 and Entity Framework “4” are bringing inovation and refinement to an otherwise traditional Microsoft product line. Combine that with Visual Studio 2010’s support for Sharepoint development, and .NET will offer developers a development platform that allows entry for an otherwise hard to enter corporate collaboration platform.

Again, speaking of the big one, Microsoft’s support of technologies such as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is still gaining popularity, while CMSes such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are using PHP as their scripting language leaving Microsoft out in the lurch. That has led Microsoft to do as much as they can to make it easy for developers to use PHP on Windows Server, as well as being easy(er) to integrate with SQL Server 2005 and 2008, even going so far as to provide support for PHP and MySQL on the Azure Cloud platform. Look for more support from Microsoft for these growing non-Microsoft technologies in 2010.

Brust believes that 2010 will not be an easy year for the IT industry, but in the end, it will begin an upward growth spurt that will lay the groundwork for the years that lay ahead.

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