I don't know about you, but I have become overwhelmed with the number
of new technologies that Microsoft have announced this year.
There are some great new applications, services and APIs, soon to be
available to developers and application consumers. It is all very exciting (unless you
happen to be a
penguin). Not to
dampen the spirits of all ye happy MS developers, but is it me or are
there far too many acronyms and
code names for all of these great
software inventions?
It took me a while, but I finally got to grips with names like
Yukon,
Indigo,
Whidbey,
Avalon, and
Longhorn, only to be astounded
further with the three letter acronym names given to the latest managed
APIs for Windows as part of the
WinFX suite - WWF, WPF, WCF, WFS. As a colleague of mine put it "
it is a marketing person's dream and a developer's nightmare".
For those suffering a similar headache to me, here is a list of some of
the newer Microsoft technologies, along with their codename/acronym:
Longhorn - The new Windows Vista operating system - successor to Windows XP.
Whidbey - Visual Studio 2005, look out for
Orcas - the next version (Visual Studio 2007) and
Hawaii - the version after Orcas.
Yukon - SQL Server 2005.
WWF - Windows Workflow Foundation - Biztalk in a nutshell.
WFS - The new file subsystem, built atop of NTFS.
WCF/Indigo - Windows Communications Foundations - The new messaging subsystem, which includes secure web services.
WPF/Avalon - Windows Presentation Foundation - The graphical
subsystem and successor to GDI, includes XAML (Extensible Application
Markup Language).
LINQ - Language Integrated Query.
Not forgetting ...
Microsoft Expression - Graphical design tool for the Vista interface.