If I tell you, I have to…

Christian Weyer is glad he can finally talk about Indigo, now that he DSG team covers Indigo at this week’s VSLive event.

The link however, brings us to an article on some site called crn, in which we can read the following statements:

• A CTP of Whidbey Beta 2 will be “issued“ by Microsoft at VSLive this week.
  No idea if they mean they’re gonna talk about it, or hand it out to the visitors. Everyone else however, won’t get their hands on Beta 2 until end March.
• The CTP will offer “more team system components“ as well as performance improvements
• Avalon seems to be for Smart clients, so it seems Ernst is right about that one.
  Anyway, Avalon, together with Indigo, should be released “very soon“. Think what you will about that statement.

Microsoft will also give details about some ISV partner tools that will be released.

• Versant will debut an OR/M tool. Why would Microsoft tell us about this tool? Has it something to do with the drop of ObjectSpaces? Because I still am clueless as to why that has been dropped together with WinFS, as Microsoft said they were tightly coupled.
• Open Access.NET, some kind of replacement for ADO.NET which should give us developers a lot more speed then with the solutions we can use now. Of course this tool will highly integrate with the still overhyped webservices, so we can all benefit! 😉
• Eiffel Software is releasing a $1500,- plugin which will give Eiffel developers (in VS2005) multiple-inheritence and, get this, generics.
• Funny thing, said is that Eiffel is based on a simplified version of UML. Funny, because Microsoft has expanded (or replaced) UML, because (especially) the .NET 2.0 specifications go beyond UML.

All announcements that make you wonder how this will fit into our near future development roads. This OR mapper will probably get a lot of attention and will be known by most, where others might already be way ahead as a tool or as experience. I’d also like to see where Open Access.NET could take us. Almost everyone I see, is using DataSets, which sometimes are definitly not the way to go. Main fault is Microsoft self I think, for providing only small pieces of code as example, and everyone presuming that’s the best practice.

Maybe some people should start up a site where people can share complete problems and their best practice solutions.

Also funny is in a linked article from the first, where some source says that “Microsoft [is] at a great strategic disadvantage in enterprise development” when it comes to their set of tools called Team System. The Rational tools however, aquired by IBM, has the advantage, according to the source, because with Microsoft tools “there’s not a proficient methodological or process base there.”
Very funny I think, because the Rational toolset is nothing more then a set of tools, which might support some documentation within RUP. Team System is nothing more, and the methodology is as far or close as you can get, with both sets of tools. My opinion however, is that this is the first version and if it has it faults, Microsoft will eventually get it right. With the fact that the Rational tools are very user unfriendly, and Microsoft tools are really user friendly, looking great with more gimmicks then Rational could ever think of. Microsoft will ‘steal’ or ‘borrow’ a lot of good ideas, but will create such a great toolset, that everyone will eventually drop Rational’s tools. Of course except for these people like in this post.