Exciting Time for Developers Ahead

Millions of programmers around the world work diligently to
produce quality software that can ease the working of all the other computer
users. No wonder that different software vendors like to push their own
technology platform as the best in terms of developer productivity. The year
ahead promises to be exciting if you are a developer. There are many new
platforms available this year or waiting in the wings to be released soon that
will make software development interesting, challenging and fun.

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  size=1>AJAX is going to be a major player in applications
  and services

  
  
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  Mobile application development will
  increase significantly

  
  
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  Common development frameworks —
  like .NET and J2EE — will make development using different servers and
  technologies a breeze

  
  
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  RAD tools will evolve from simply
  providing drag-and-drop programming to helping architect secure and scalable
  applications

The Microsoft stables
After a fairly long lull in
the timeframe between major releases, Microsoft has a ton of new stuff for
developers ready. The first and the foremost are the simultaneous releases of
Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005-that work on completely new and improved
.NET Framework 2.0. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Visual Studio Team
System is a new offering from MS that enables collaboration between large
development teams even across geographies. Team System also allows enhanced
productivity by including developers, testers and software and infrastructure
architects to collaborate and work together on the same product. What this means
is that all software development can follow a prescribed development
methodology-architecting, development and testing without resorting to
un-integrated products to do the same.

Microsoft is also revamping the BizTalk Server line with its
new 2006 version. Many of the other servers such as MCMS are expected
to get complete facelifts as well.