Just following up again on When In Doubt, Ignore Longhorn to point out an interesting survey of MS bloggers by David Weller. Apparently, out of 56 recent blog entries by Microsoft employees, 8 were related to Longhorn. That's about 14%, which is a little higher than the 10% that I argued for, but I bet if you took out the ones from me (whose job it is to talk about Longhorn), we'd be closer. : )

It's interesting to see an Internet-based company talk about using smart client technologies to provide their customers with a richer experience than they could provide over the web. I roamed the country for years talking to folks about Windows Forms and No-Touch Deployment for their internal stuff and they ate it up. When Whidbey ships and provides ClickOnce capabilities for Windows Forms apps, attaining Internet-reach with smart clients becomes feasible *much* sooner than Longhorn.

Friday, January 30th, 2004

In response to my post yesterday (When In Doubt, Ignore Longhorn), Shaun asked whether he should be targeting Longhorn-only right now:

[ed: the following has been edited to remove identifying remarks at Shaun’s request]

Thanks for all the great posts and community participation over the past year. Your recent ‘Ignore Longhorn’ post alarmed me a bit. I hope that was not born from some aspect of it being pushed past 2006.

Anyway, I know you are busy, so I will get to the point. We are mid-sized, established s/w company, and a Microsoft shop to the core (SQL Server, Analysis Services, VB, we embed VBA etc…). I am facing a huge decision regarding building our next gen app architecture. We need to ship in 1H 2006, and (IMO) we need to target rich and reach, so Longhorn is on my list of possible directions along with some ASP.NET 2.0 / ClickOnce combination.

I am enjoying working with Longhorn (XAML in particular), but I’m having a hard time shaking the feeling that I am taking too much of a gamble if I go Longhorn-Only, but some of the aspects are just so compelling. On the other hand, I’d hate to make a huge 2-3 year dev investment in ASP.NET only to ship something in 2006 that is not revolutionary/differentiated. I firmly believe our existing 3 million lines of solid COM code has plenty of life in it too.

Any insight or advice you might have would be greatly appreciated. I know it is probably difficult without understanding our company or market, but maybe some general advice to someone who is targeting a 2006 release. I guess my other worry surrounds the Longhorn adoption rate, but obviously none of us can predict that!

Here was my answer:

Shaun, if you think that Longhorn is going to help you build a differentiated product that’ll help you be more successful, then great! That’s why we’re building it.

On the other hand, if I were you, I wouldn’t put all my money into a single investment. Instead, I’d use some diversification strategies like you would with your financial portfolio. At this point, the ship date of Longhorn, along with the list of features it will support when it ships, is merely speculative. I won’t put more than 10% of my available investment time/money/staff into it, leaving the rest of my portfolio for getting the most I can from my existing and/or near future technologies.

Specifically, you ask about ASP.NET 2.0 and Windows Forms/ClickOnce. Both of those technologies rock. ASP.NET is going to be the way to build web sites and services for the next decade at least, even after Longhorn’s been out for years, since it has the reach across our existing OSes and competing OSes. Plus, ASP.NET 2.0 has a dizzying list of new features that people will spend years just taking full advantage of. For reach, you can’t make a better investment than ASP.NET.

For rich, on the other hand, Windows Forms + ClickOnce is a killer combo. The updated Windows Forms in Whidbey along provides some amazing new capabilities, not the least of which is the new GridView, which you can read about in Michael’s new Wonders of Windows Forms piece. Also, look for a “What’s New in Whidbey Windows Forms” piece in MSDN Magazine RSN. ClickOnce (which you can learn more about in Duncan’s ClickOnce piece and in Jamie’s ClickOnce talk) is the way to deploy rich clients in Whidbey and in Longhorn, so digging into that technology is a very good idea.

As time goes on and Longhorn becomes a more solid development investment, you should put more of your portfolio into it. If you’ve got plenty of time/money/staff, than 10% now could mean an entire pilot project in Longhorn, which would be a good thing. But if you’ve got limited amounts of time/money/staff that you really need to yield a dividend now, Longhorn is dangerous for you and should only be something you dabble with at this point.

For you specifically, a mid-sized company, you should carve off a chunk of your dev. staff to build a pilot in Longhorn. This lets you dabble while the rest of your staff is busy with existing and near future technologies. And as you dabble and notice things that don’t work at all as you expect or need, let us know! Operators are standing by to take your calls! We’re at a stage in our development process where we’re able to give much more attention to the fundamentals than we will be at beta, so the 10% you put into Longhorn now could yield large dividends in the future.

And as to your follow up comment, I’m happy that you enjoyed my response, but I’m pretty sure an autograph from Sting would be cooler. : )

I don't know what a "Meetup" is, but I signed up for a “Longhorn Meetup” in 97007 (and I wasn't the first). Will it hurt?

Robert Hess kicks off a series of Longhorn episodes on The .NET Show with a Longhorn overview, featuring some of the major movers and shakers behind the technology and then, of course, some shenanigans from none other than the poster children of coding for Longhorn, Don "Outofthe" Box and Chris "Mr." Anderson.

Thursday, January 29th, 2004

A guy walks into an exotic car dealer and asks the salesman the price of the fancy new Ferrari in the corner. The salesman looks at him with a sad look on his face, shakes his head and says, “I’m afraid, sir, that if you have to ask, you won’t be able to afford it.”

If you’re wondering whether you should be paying attention to the information on Longhorn that has appeared on the web and in the news lately, then you shouldn’t be. Longhorn RTM is years away. This is the most lead time we’ve given on any Windows operating system ever. The reason we did it was so that we could get super early adopters to give us meaningful feedback while we still had enough of the development cycle left to make meaningful changes. If you’re not a super early adopter, than Longhorn is just going to be noise that you should ignore ’til the beta hits.

For day-to-day development, you should pay attention to .NET 1.1 news sources. For the near future, you’ll want to listen for Whidbey, the next version of the .NET Framework, which should work on all supported OSes when it ships. Here are a list of my favorite news sources for current information and near future information:

.NET Framework 1.x Information Sources:

• MSDN: The vast majority of existing and new information you’ll find on MSDN is on currently shipping technologies. My Developer Center brethren post tons of new stuff every month all about helping you be successful today. Also, one part of the Longhorn Developer Center that you should check out is the Preparing for Longhorn section, where I keep resources that you’ll need to know about today so that you can keep Longhorn in mind for tomorrow (or the day after tomorrow : ).
• MSDN Magazine: MSDN Magazine does a fabulous job of helping folks take advantage of .NET 1.x and have recently been doing articles on Whidbey and Yukon.
• MSDN Columns: If you haven’t seen the columns that MSDN hosts online, you’re missing a ton of great stuff from experts in the field. Besides the Longhorn columns (which you should ignore if you’re in doubt!), my personal favorite is Wonders of Windows Forms, which has also been focused on taking the best advantage of Windows Forms and where Michael Weinhardt has just started with a series of Whidbey Windows Forms topics that’ll make you drool.
• GotDotNet: This site is host to a raft of content and tools and code samples from the .NET product teams along with active web forums.
• CodeProject.com: CodeProject is my favorite user-contributions site and has tons of new source code samples and articles all the time about all manner of existing Microsoft technologies.
• DotNet Newsgroups: The newsgroups are a hotbed of information on current technologies and are staffed by a large number of Microsoft employees to answer your questions.
• International .NET Association (INETA): Don’t just sit around and code by yourself, find a user group near you!
• DevelopMentor mailing lists: The .NET mailing list hosted at DevelopMentor launched a development culture. Their mailing lists are still tops in my book.
• .NET 247: I can’t tell you how often my Google searches on Microsoft-related technologies yields an answer on this site.
• Most Microsoft bloggers: Sure, Box, Anderson and Scoble hog the limelight, but some of my favorite bloggers concentrate on today’s technologies. Don’t miss Adam, Chris, Duncan, Dino, Kent or Raymond.
• Whidbey Series on MSDN TV: If you want some info on the not-too-distant future, Erica Wiechers’s series of Whidbey topics on MSDN TV is a great place to start.
• Whidbey/Yukon PDC talks: Contrary to popular belief, most of the talks at the PDC were not Longhorn-related and it’s not too late to catch the videos or download the slides if you weren’t able to catch them all.
• Scott Guthrie’s Blog: For juicy bits of ASP.NET 2.0 information, you can’t beat Scott Guthrie’s blog.
• theServerSide.NET: I haven’t spent much time on this site yet, but Richard Burte, an MS PM, says he likes it well enough to add it to this list.
• What did I miss?

That’s not to say that Microsoft is going to stop talking about Longhorn in the WinFX newsgroups, on the Longhorn Developer Center and in blogs of all kinds. We do this so that those folks that can think about the distant future today have a chance to make their voices heard at a time when we can most take advantage of what they’re saying.

However, there continues to be more information than any human can consume on current Microsoft technologies, so don’t be alarmed when you see something go by with Longhorn in the title; just ignore it until you think that Longhorn can help make your business more successful. That’s why we’re building it after all. : )

Wes muses on whether XAML could become a “standard” document format for even custom types. Certainly, if a document was serialized in XAML using custom types instead of in a custom format, it would save some translation to/from the Avalon object model…

If you’ve noticed Stuart Celarier stalking the WinFX newsgroups lately, it’s because he’s been gathering the best stuff for use in his new Longhorn Developer FAQ.

Plus, Stuart’s got all kinds of cool FAQ features, like expanding/contracting items and URLs for each category and for each item. Even cooler, the source document is a WordML document that Stuart authors in Word and then translates into HTML for the MSDN site using an XSLT. It’s a very cool model for FAQs in general and I know that Stuart’s planning to share the FAQ framework on his site.

And, if you’ve got an feedback on the FAQ items or would like to see new ones (or would like to hire him — he’s amazing with all things XML), feel free to send him an email.