2010 Predictions galore
Just did a quick tour on the net about the predictions being made for 2010 in the .Net world … and what is so striking, is that almost everywhere, Silverlight, with its 4th incarnation, is being touted as one of the stars of the year.
Here a list of random picks:
- 10 Microsoft Predictions For 2010
- Top 25 Tech Predictions for 2010
- 2010 technology predictions
- Predictions for 2010 Part I- Beyond .NET
- 2010 New-Year Prediction: Silverlight + Azure = The New Windows
- Predictions 2010 [Technology]
In 2010, Silverlight 4 will help you build Line of Business (LOB) applications so easily that it’s gonna be laughable. Think about it for a minute … SL allows you to develop web applications that have desktop-like rich feature sets in a cross-platform manner. Also, those web applications can be taken out-of-browser and used as ocasionally-connected applications. Even better, it can transparently leverage your powerful GPU to integrate some crazy-never-seen-before-groundbreaking UI metaphors. Sounds like heaven ? 
Well not yet, because until recently, it was still difficult to access data from a Silverlight application … you had to go through all that boring thinking to design a 2 or 3 tiers architecture, probably passing some DTOs around, mapping, converting or even better, change-tracking, across tiers. But this is soon going to be the past, as RIA Services will simplify all of that. RIA Services is ADO.Net for Silverlight. It lets you access your database directly in your rich UI, query it, change-track it, validate it, bind it, xaml-ize it. Add some LINQ-icing on top and you’ve got some more great magic happening in there.
Sounds like something familiar … desktop applications, almost-direct database access … didn’t we have that in the past ? Wasn’t it a thing called Client-Server ? Damn yeah ! That thing was so simple, I remember now ! Why did we go through all those crazy architecture evolutions, design patterns, … to finally come back to it ! You gotta be wondering
Anyway, I hope that by now, you’ve noticed that I was a bit ironic about all of this … because I think that you have to be very careful with the latest cool stuff and not just blindly think it’s gonna solve all of your problems. Silverlight is a very fine piece of technology, but it’s easy to fall into some bad practices. RIA Services will be the same kind of beast. It will bring some interesting abstractions, but as with all abstractions, you’ll have some simplifications that will be applied here and there, so beware.
So, let’s get into the game, here are my predictions for 2010:
- Silverlight will indeed see a broader adoption, and WinForms / WPF desktop applications will continue to slowly decline. There will also most probably be more and more SL projects that, by trying to do so much in a browser, will have performance, scalability & memory problems. Similarly, backend resources will continue to be used inefficiently.
- Ayende will most probably add a RIA Services-Prof to its profiler suite, helping developers understanding why the heck are so many HTTP requests being sent from the UI to the backend server.
- The reality depicted by M. Nygard in 2008 will still hold true in 2010 (just replace J2EE by .Net).
