Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

On the Far Horizon

At the time of this writing, very few specifics had been made known regarding .NET v4 and the other technologies that make up the Oslo platform. We know that its focus is on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the creation of business software as a service. Indeed, Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices team has already started down that road, producing a first guidance document for creating a platform for SOA applications using BizTalk 2006.

In his general session at TechEd Europe 2007, Pat Helland pointed out that the way in which the hardware we use is created, assigned a cost, and treated has changed, and will continue to change, over at least the next five years. Moore’s Law may still hold true until 2020, but the ever-shrinking transistor is giving rise not to the creation of CPUs with ever-higher frequencies, but rather to multicore CPUs. Today, dual- and quad-core CPUs crop up in home hardware, and anything up to 32-core chips is available in high-end server farms. These chips, memory, storage, and bandwidth have all become so cheap to manufacture that cost-benefit analysis of some scenarios shows that low- to no-maintenance disposable data centers may be the way forward rather than the traditional, carefully maintained center that may be feasible for only absolutely critical data. The point is that changes in the way we use hardware will affect how we write our software to make full use of it.

Creating software that’s available as a disconnected software ...