Editor's Note
Topic Coverage Update
Over the past couple of months, we've received a lot of mail about our recent issues. Although opinions are mixed, several people have let us know that they feel we've covered too much forward-looking content recently. This is a valid concern, and we'd like to address it.
Dev magazine coverage around products always goes in cycles. There's the beta build-up, the early adopter coverage, and the maintenance mode coverage. We've always felt that each of these areas is important to you especially because many of you have told us you keep issues for a year or more, referring back to them when an article becomes relevant to your current projects.
Last autumn, we had a unique opportunity to provide early coverage of two long-term betas that were announced at the Los Angeles PDC: "Longhorn" (the next version of Windows) and "Yukon" (now known as SQL Server 2005). These products will both be extremely important in the years to come, and we wanted to give you the first in-depth look at them, which we did in our January and February 2004 issues.
In the May and June issues, we devoted considerable space to Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, two more major products that will soon be affecting the way you program. Three factors went into our thinking when planning these issues:
- More of you than ever are MSDN Universal subscribers, and therefore have access to these products today.
- We are still providing plenty of "right now" content, especially in our columns. For example, our June issue covered Visual Studio 2005, but it also featured lots of pages on current real-world solutions.
- You have a lot of say in your company's future decisions, and it's important that we bring you the best coverage of what's coming up so you can make those decisions wisely.
There are other factors in our content decisions as well. As one reader said, it's good to see products early on so that he can lend his voice to modifications and features that could make it into the final release. The past year has been unusual in that there are many more product cycles coming to the forefront—an updated OS, DBMS, Internet extensions, and development IDE. That's a lot of stuff to take in, and it's part of our role as the official Microsoft magazine for developers to bring you not only what you need to know now, but what you'll need to know in the next year or so. Since many of you may not have access to these products yet, we're wondering if the coverage was too detailed, too early. We have heard quite a few opinions on both sides of the fence, and we'd like to hear from you too. Drop us a line at mmeditor@microsoft.com and let us know what you think.
On another note, we are making some exciting improvements in our content. You'll notice a new column in the magazine this month: Test Run. Testing is as important to software development as the initial coding of an application, and we're putting our money where our pages are. Dr. James McCaffrey, an articulate expert on testing methodology, will be writing a regular column on, you guessed it, testing. This isn't the standard "run a unit test" kind of stuff, either. If you're the type of dev who disdains test, give Test Run a look anyway. We bet you'll change your mind.
We are also pleased to welcome some new regular authors to our columnist roster. Duncan Mackenzie, MSDN online's Visual Basic expert extraordinaire, will be sharing the writing credits of the revamped Advanced Basics column with two other industry leaders, Ken Getz and Carl Franklin. You may know Ken and Carl from industry conferences. (Carl's the one who cracks the bad jokes, and Ken's the one who politely pretends to laugh.)
Finally, we'd like you to do a little exercise with the magazine. Place this issue on a flat surface and turn to the last page. What do you see? Hmmmm? Our back page has been overhauled. The new column, { End Bracket }, will feature a lively mix of commentary from key industry figures, resource information for developers, and maybe an occasional interview. Don't like the way we put spaces around the curly braces? Don't take it out on the guest columnists; they didn't know it was happening.
Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Uwa Agbonile, Mike Ammerlaan, Eugene Bobukh, Brandon Bray, Mike Downen, Mike Fitzmaurice, Bill Gibson, Chris Hollander, Kannan C. Iyer, John Koropchak, Min Kwan Park, Ronald Laeremans, Ivan Medvedev, Patrick Ng, Gus Perez, Joel Pobar, Matt Powell, Ramesh Rajagopal, Yasser Shohoud, Keith Short, John Stallo, Alex Torone, Dmitriy Vasyura, and Daniel Witriol.
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