Editor's Note

Hanging Onto The Long Tail

Howard Dierking

As I look over this month's editorial lineup I'm struck by the fact that the coverage is overwhelmingly focused on new technologies. Many of them, such as the new HierarchyID data type in SQL Server (discussed by Kent Tegels) and ADO.NET Data Services (examined by Shawn Wildermuth), will soon be available in final form for you to start using in real projects. We're also getting close to the long-awaited release of Silverlight 2, a subject that Shawn Wildermuth also covers.

This train of thought brings me to wonder where you are in your own development projects. In this issue, Brian Noyes looks at advanced Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) concepts such as routed commands and events and Glenn Block examines strategies for building loosely coupled, composite applications in WPF. I'm curious as to whether you've jumped into XAML yet, or if the majority of your work is still with Windows Forms. When considering the new HierarchyID data type in SQL Server 2008, we look at how this feature can eliminate the need to create common table expressions (CTEs) to navigate a recursive hierarchy—but have you gotten deep enough with SQL Server 2005 to actually understand and use CTEs?

Recently I've been reading a well-known book called "The Long Tail." One of its main premises is that technology, namely the Internet, has transformed the mass market into millions of niche markets. The author argues that prior to the age of the Web, economics were driven by "hit" products and that this dynamic was largely a result of scarcity or lack of choice. In the Internet age, however, this model has been fragmented into myriad choices and alternatives—visually creating a graph where the demand for items in the tail adds up to be equal to or greater than the demand for the hits, or items at the head of the graph—hence the name "long tail."

There certainly seems to be a long tail effect when it comes to software. On the Web, software products developed by a company staffed with a few college friends have equal "shelf placement" with similar products developed by large software companies like Microsoft. This creates another dynamic, one in which the larger software companies feel driven to innovate more and release more frequently. And while I think this second dynamic is a good thing in general, it can also be a source of frustration for those of us who develop on the Microsoft technology stack.

Why the frustration? Were I able to animate the illustration here, what would become more obvious is that while the long tail never reaches zero, the head is constantly moving. Thus, if your livelihood comes from a demand for technical skills, and that demand is based on a long tail curve where the head is moving at an increasing rate, you can feel like you're living on a treadmill and someone keeps simultaneously increasing the speed and the incline.

So where are you on the long tail of technology? Are you scrambling to learn new skills, or have you found your own niche by grabbing onto a specific set of technologies? Drop us an e-mail and let us know!

Visit us at msdn.microsoft.com/magazine. Questions, comments, or suggestions for MSDN Magazine? Send them to the editor: mmeditor@microsoft.com.

Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Paul Andrew, Jonathan Aneja, Bob Brumfield, Jeff Cao, Kiran Dowluru, Ryan Duguid, Mike Flasko, Matt Gibbs, Kevin Gjerstad, Christian Kleinerman, Bertrand Le Roy, Varsha Mahadevan, Duane Need, Wayne Norton, Eugene Osovetsky, Dave Reed, Michael Rys, Gerhard Schneider, and Michael Wang.