4 years on, my 400th blog post

Yesterday, on the Ides of March, a date of which you should beware if you happen to be Caesar, an anniversary came and went. Four years ago, fresh-faced and wet behind the ears, I became CTO of Developer Express. Today, I’m older and wiser, grizzled you might say, despite only being 35 (cough, cough).

Over the past 4 years, there have been many changes at DevExpress, in the market we compete, and with the technologies we use. I won’t go through them in a retrospective here, mainly because there have been so many, but also it’s a little boring.

Boring? Yes, because yesterday more than ever I feel we’re on the cusp of some extremely exciting developments. In fact, I can’t think of such major developments in the past 4 years that approach what we’re learning at MIX10 this week, starting yesterday. Certainly, we’ve known about some of them for a little while, and some of them are still only hinted at despite the atmosphere of openness at MIX, but in aggregate they’re game-changing.

• Windows Phone 7 apps will be Silverlight apps. Drop kick Windows Mobile into the trashcan, stuff native apps, it’s Silverlight all the way. Oh and you can get the full VS2010 IDE plus phone emulator to create WP7 app for free (note though that the apps will have to be approved before they can be sold, à la Apple Store). No phones yet.
• Silverlight grows up with Silverlight 4. VS2010 has a usable designer, Blend with the v4 beta is better than ever. Better trusted client apps, myriad new multimedia features, much better developer support.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 and ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2. This little lot is like drinking from the firehose. Too much to detail here; there’s way more information on the Microsoft sites than I could hope to summarize. But watch out come mid-April when it’s all released.

All of these things affect what we do at DevExpress. Once MIX10 is over and our gang of developers who are there return to the DevExpress HQ, we’ll have to have some discussions about what we’ll be changing for v2010.1, if anything, and v2010.2.

So, stay tuned to the blogs here for more news as it happens.

By the way, this is my 400th post on this blog. Another celebration!

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