Two Questions with Telerik's Stephen Forte
A few weeks ago, I got to talk (via e-mail) with Stephen Forte, who is chief strategy officer of component maker Telerik. I was interested in two sets of questions: One about what the industry looks like from the perspective of someone in the business, and the other about how Telerik competes in that market.
This blog entry focuses on two questions I wanted to ask about the industry in general:
Peter Vogel: What does the Visual Studio "toolspace" look like from Telerik's point of view? How do you see it changing?
Stephen Forte: From a "tools" perspective, the modern developer needs to maximize productivity while building all layers of an application. When I first started to use an IDE 15 years ago, the "toolspace" was pretty much only the UI layer. Today tools are there for all layers and consist of everything from UI controls, to ORMs, to services, to refactoring, to testing, to "enforcement" (stylecop and the like.) I see this evolving considerably over the next few years to start including productivity tools for teams. You already see this with SCM tools like Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, however I think "tools for teams" is pretty new today and will evolve rapidly over the next few years.
PV: What do you think will have the biggest impact on .NET/Visual Studio developers in the next two years?
SF: Hands down, multi-core. As Anders Hejlsberg said, we have been ignoring this reality for a few years. With quad core laptops becoming standard and two core netbooks costing $500, it is impossible to ignore. Parallelism brings a whole set of new challenges to the .NET developer. Not to spew hyperbole, but the switch to parallelism is going to be as dramatic as the switch from COM to .NET. Should be fun and Telerik will have to reinvent itself all over again.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/21/2010