In-Depth
The 2011 .NET Survival Guide
A look inside the critical technologies and tools that will shape .NET development over the next year.
Since the arrival of Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 in April 2010, the pace of advancement in the .NET development space has been nothing short of torrid. Silverlight has continued to iterate at a near-frantic clip, even as Microsoft moved swiftly to mature disparate platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure. From the handset to the cloud, developers face a dizzying array of choices and alternatives.
2011 will be a critical year for many dev shops, as they look to commit to the tooling Microsoft released the year before. Whether it's wrestling with a move from Windows Forms to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Silverlight, or weighing the costs and benefits of shifting from LINQ to Entity Framework, the stakes involved in many of these decisions are incredibly high.
To help .NET developers cope, we look at seven distinct development areas and the technologies and trends shaping them in the year ahead.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.