Microsoft Dream or Nightmare?
I've been concerned for a long time—and, frankly, a bit amused and perplexed—by Microsoft's previewing new technologies so very long before they are available. Pre-alpha, or something like that. (Or is it a technology preview? I'm never sure.) The strategy went into overdrive with all of the .NET stuff and that exciting PDC oh so many years ago. It's a far cry from when betas were tightly controlled secrets, and common folk's first view of a product was when it shipped out the door for real.
Here's the problem. We developers slog through our every day life using the released versions of tools, getting real work done. There is so much to learn and know about the current state of the tools and technologies that I still feel like I've only scratched the surface of a very thick block of knowledge. I'm figuring out how to do stuff in real apps today, and sometimes feel like I'm barely keeping up with that.
So I go to a PDC that is completely about tools and technologies that are a bare minimum of two years away. (Maybe sooner, but who knows?) And I get wowed by the cool stuff that the 'Softies show off that they're working on, with cool and mysterious code names like Whidbey and Longhorn (along with bootleg product group shirts that infringe on copyrights) and Yukon and Avalon and Indigo and so many more. And I even get a CD with versions of the stuff that runs! It's cool! It's real! When can I have it???
All of which doesn't do a single blasted thing to help me get my current project developed and out the door today.
So now we see magazine articles already with how-tos about developing with the tools and people getting all worked up about stuff. And how they're going to plug in the new stuff into their apps. And fretting about how to roll out the stuff and debating about how quickly it will be adapted and on and on.
But get real, people! Everything we've seen about Longhorn and Whidbey to date is pure dreamland, an exercise of very creative and very cool fantasy thinking by Microsoft. Scoble talks about it in a blog entry Longhorn getting its horns cut? and how the BusinessWeek article has prompted all kinds of questions about whether WinFS is getting cut. These are not real products and very likely bear no resemblance whatsoever to will eventually ship. The feature sets aren't even set yet!!!
The one exception is possibly Yukon, which is late enough in the cycle to both have a real name and what is apparently a feature-stable beta.
So why does Microsoft do this? Roll things out and whip us all into a froth over what's coming? They say that it's to get feedback about what's important to include in order to ship in a reasonable time. And I think that's true, although sometimes they are misleading—intentionally or not (and I suspect it's not)—about what will actually make it into the product, such as edit and continue in ASP.NET 2.0.
But please keep firmly grounded in reality, folks. Work with the tools we have, get excited about what might happen at some indeterminate future time zone, give kudos and bitch about what you like and don't like about Microsoft's dream-state products. But don't ever mistake fantasyware with production tools.