Windows Phone 7. .NET 4.0. Office 365. Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Oh, and “The Dawn of a New Day.”
The past year was a busy time for developers at Microsoft, which released updates to the .NET Framework, its development and collaboration tools, and its mobile phone platform. Not to mention the cloud, which outgoing chief software architect Ray Ozzie identified as the future of computing in his October “farewell note” to Microsoft’s employees.
Visual Studio 2010 rolled out in April with new architecture and testing tools that broadened its life-cycle capabilities. The .NET Framework 4.0 also was released at that time, with dynamic language support and tighter XAML-based integration between Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation.
In May, SharePoint 2010 hit the streets (along with Office 2010). Microsoft spun the wheel on SharePoint to include communities, composites and sites as pillars, and added many new features for developers to create richer, more integrated SharePoint applications. Microsoft also talked up SharePoint Online more in 2010 as part of the company’s overall services strategy.
That was underscored in Ozzie’s note, in which he described a “post-PC world” of cloud-based continuous services and appliance-like connected devices for interacting with those services. And at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in late October, Microsoft proved it was “all in” with the cloud by providing a detailed road map for its Azure cloud operating system, database and middleware services.
