My technology picks for 2010
ASP.NET MVC is the natural way to program ASP.NET web applications and it is really a breathing of fresh air. I hope that ASP.NET developers will widely adopt ASP.NET MVC along with the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. ASP.NET MVC lets you to write very clean and elegant code in the natural way of web is working. You can build killer web 2.0 applications with ASP.NET MVC 2 and jQuery. The new ASP.NET MVC 2 has lot of productivity and maintainability features and Microsoft’s vision is to make ASP.NET MVC 2 is an “Enterprise ready” framework.
Entity Framework 4
When I was looking into ASP.NET MVC in the early days, my favorite ORM was NHibernate. After watching the PDC 09 sessions and some learning of the new Entity Framework features, I really like the Entity Framework version of the .NET Framework 4. Dear ALT.NET guys, don’t get angry on the Entity Framework, the new one is cool. Entity Framework 4 is not just an ORM and it is more than any ORM tool and has modeling capabilities.
Windows Azure
Is Cloud computing an over hyped thing? But it is more realistic than the previous SOA hype and I hope that Windows Azure has bright future. The Windows Azure Cloud computing platform will be mostly attracted by the .NET community. The cloud computing platforms will greatly benefit to small companies and start-ups and they can think big and can develop great SaaS model application on the cloud and later scale up their applications on-demand.
Parallel Extensions for .NET
Performance will be the most critical part of next-generation applications. Today hardware infrastructure is too powerful and modern computers have multi cores, or CPUs, which enable them to execute multiple threads concurrently. To taking the advantage of the today’s hardware infrastructure, developers need to parallelize their code to distribute work across multiple processors. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 enhance support for parallel programming with a new runtime, new class library types, and diagnostic tools that enable us to develop high performance applications with parallel computing features.
Microsoft Velocity
Performance will be the key objective of applications especially in the web applications and scalability will be the most challenging part of application architecture. A right caching mechanism can make high-performance applications and Microsoft is lacking in the area of caching platform for the many years. The Velocity framework is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, high-performance applications. The key aspects of Velocity are distributed cache performance, scalability, and availability. The Velocity framework will benefits enterprise applications greatly and you can make your cache data available on multiple applications and server farms.