Hello, 2012

Early 2011 I blogged about my predictions on 2011. What were the things I blogged about the last year, was it becoming true? How does 2012 look like? The main topics my blog was about Silverlight 5, Windows Azure, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8, and HTML 5. Let’s have a look how my thoughts from early 2011 look like today, and what I think are the most important topics for 2012.

Silverlight 5

2011 (and earlier 2010) I blogged about the features of the upcoming coming Silverlight 5. In December 2011 it was finally released as is described here.

Now Silverlight 5 might not look as important as it was in the beginning of 2011. It’s not the tool of choice for writing platform-independent applications which is HTML 5 now. Silverlight applications cannot be used for Metro style apps with Windows 8. However, the traditional desktop of Windows 8 still is an important part to write applications for it for the next years to come. Looking into version 5, Silverlight received a lot of features important and helpful writing full desktop applications.

Silverlight 5 is supported by Microsoft until 10/12/2021, or through the support lifecycle of the underlying browsers, whichever is shorter. This should give enough time to give Silverlight the emphasis it needs to write new applications now. And the knowledge of XAML and C# can still be used with Metro apps in Windows 8.

Windows Azure

In 2011 I also blogged about new things coming with Windows Azure. Windows Azure still keeps growing, new features are added in a continuously basis. The cloud is becoming more and more important as the same data should be accessible from anywhere, no matter what device is used, and in some scenarios scalability can be solved by adding Windows Azure instances and just paying the instances needed.

New features recently added are support for Node.js, Hadoop-based Services, Federations, queues, topics, and relay services… More to come in 2012

Windows Phone

I also mentioned Windows Phone 7 with the Mango update to support copy and paste. The 7.5 update delivered a lot more great features as described in What’s new in Windows Phone 7.5. I really like this update and use the integration of Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn… a lot.

Currently Microsoft’s phone does not have the market presence it should have. I think this will change – and Nokia still has a lot of announcements to do to make Windows Phone more successful. It’s not the first time that Microsoft was a little late in the game but finally succeeded.

Windows 8

Early 2011 I already blogged about Windows 8 and expected a PDC for 2011 that should be a lot bigger than the 2010 PDC. This conference was a lot bigger, and still outsold just with the early bird bookings – and all this without posting an abstract of a single session before the conference. Just the name of the conference changed: Build Windows.

Although I was expecting a lot that was announced at this conference I was still surprised how well this all worked out and really like the new UI of the upcoming operating system. Applications to use the Metro UI can use XAML/C# or HTML5/JavaScript or XAML/C++. The choices are here. The application UI design must be done differently to be successful. Writing applications for Windows 8 I’m thinking a lot more about usability and how to change the workflow to be both easy to use and effective for the user.

Early 2012 (February?) I’m expecting the Beta version of Windows 8 and I’m already working now on several apps.

HTML 5 and JavaScript

Early 2011 I already mentioned HTML5 and already had several customers in 2011 to support them with HTML and JavaScript. HTML and JavaScript is making a comeback. jQuery helped a lot to make JavaScript programming more efficient.

I’m not only giving HTML5 and JavaScript an important place to create platform-independent applications to run on different mobiles and desktops but also think it’s a great option to write Metro style apps for Windows 8. For platform-independent HTML I'm using ASP.NET MVC that allows for great control of HTML and JavaScript.

Languages

For 2012 I’m also seeing a comeback for C++. C++11 gets cool improvements, and the support from Microsoft with Metro and XAML/C++ is here again. There are some applications that didn’t change the C++ code to .NET, and such libraries can now be really easy to use with new Metro style apps.

Of course C# gets cool improvements for async programming in 2012 that’s not less important. I’m working with C#, C++, and JavaScript in 2012.

I’m expecting 2012 to be an exciting year, expecting some new tablets that let Windows 8 shine, and put my big focus for the year on Windows 8 Metro, Windows Azure, HTML5, ASP.NET MVC, C++, C#, and JavaScript. Of course I’m also still doing WPF, Silverlight, and WCF, and writing about improvements on .NET 4.5. Already working on the next edition of Professional C# for several months now…

Christian

CN innovation

Comments

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