Paul Thurrott has published “The Road to Windows Longhorn 2005”. In the piece he sets out a timeline which lists the RTM date of Longhorn as May 24, 2006. While that seems a fair way down the track it isn’t really, especially if you are a developer who will be expected to be familiar with the new platform features so that you can take advantage of them in your application.
This year is going to be a busy year for .NET developers with a impending release of Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005. I feel that most people will be completely hit of a six when they start using 2005 (if they haven’t used the BETA and CTP releases already) and by the time they recover they are going to get hit in the snoz by new Longhorn API’s which I am just dying to be able to use in production applications.
What is unclear to me at this point is what the tooling story around Longhorn is going to be. It seems like it would be too early for Orcas (the version of Visual Studio after Visual Studio 2005), so are we going to see some kind of an add-in for VS2005. The Avalon CTP (part of the presentation stack for Longhorn) included a number of project templates but nothing by way of designer support.
This wasn’t a huge burden since XAML’s declaritive XML syntax is pretty easy to get the hang of. I’m wondering whether the decision to bring Avalon to XP is a very clever move to get developers used to the platform before it ships so that by the time users get to it they are ready to deploy and are wanting to take advantage of extended features like pop-up-toast.
Its going to be an interesting 18–months in .NET land.