DevExpress 2012 roadmap published

After what seems to be a long gestation, we’ve now published our roadmap for 2012. There should be nothing too surprising in it; after all, the big elephant in the room is being closely watched by everyone: Windows 8. It goes without saying perhaps that a lot of our development this year will be geared to touch, Metro, WinRT, HTML5, and the like, and equally without saying that we cannot be very detailed in what we are going to do for this new platform (after all the Developer Preview is now some 5 months old and we’re raring to see what’s next).

A couple of points about the roadmap, if I may. First, this year more than ever, the role of the user interface/experience designer in your organization is going to be of primary importance. Although we are going to be driving forward with our efforts to simplify the process of creating visually stunning applications – especially on the new Windows platform – you should be aware that a designer will be the ideal person to ensure the best user experience, notably on the new slates and tablets that will be announced alongside Windows 8. Touch != mouse, by any stretch of the imagination. This tactile ease of use will be filtering down into the classical desktop experience, so be prepared to think in different ways about how to display information, and not just data. Our analytics products (grids, pivots, reports, charts) will help immeasurably here, so we shall be beefing those up with new functionality and features.

Second, no matter how much you’d like to dump all your heavy current projects and, thus lightened and unencumbered, jump on the passing Metro train, we all know that it not going to happen. You need to bridge the gap between what you are doing now and what you will be doing. DevExpress recognize this and we have some great new enhancements in the pipeline to make your traditional apps Metro-inspired.

The road map is available here.

Let’s see what develops.

Free DevExpress Products – Get Your Copy Today