Introduction

The .NET Framework, Visual Studio .NET, and associated technologies have achieved quite a lot even in their initial releases. The .NET platform provides many benefits over its predecessors from a developer productivity, scalability, manageability, and security perspective. However, what you have seen so far is still the beginning of an exciting feature. For instance, you haven't seen full-blown use of managed code within the entire Windows operating systems, you still have a number of servers and applications that don't completely utilize the managed environment, and so on. These and a whole lot of other changes are expected to be available in future releases of the Windows operating system, SQL Server, .NET Framework, and Visual Studio .NET.

At the time of writing this book, not much information was available, making this chapter probably one of the most difficult chapters to write. However, the effort is to provide a glimpse of what is expected to be in the next few releases of the Microsoft platform. The information presented in this book is based on roadmap documents, high-level presentations that have surfaced at the time of writing this book. I would recommend that you review this information in context with the latest information available on these technologies, knowing that some of this might have changed.