Every year, there's one underlying theme that seems to be pushed in the technology arena more than anything. This year, I feel like it's the year of the cloud. The last time I did this was five years ago, so I'll have to back-fill a few years, but here are the themes I've noticed over the past 11 years.

• 2008: Year of the Cloud
• 2007: Year of User Experience
• 2006: Year of AJAX/Web 2.0
• 2005: Year of SaaS
• 2004: Year of Offshore Outsourcing
• 2003: Year of the Architect
• 2002: Year of Web Services
• 2001: Year of XML/.NET
• 2000: Year of Enterprise Java
• 1999: Year of Linux
• 1998: Year of the Web

We've been approaching "the year of the cloud" for a while, now. You can actually look back to 1998, when the web started to really catch on. A few years later, as Java started to build momentum and then .NET hit the scenes, which is when XML as a standard communication language started to catch on. Also tied to the .NET release was a huge push for web services. As this was more and more successful, service-oriented architecture (SOA) started to boom. In my mind, that was a big boon to the outsourcing trends, which have seemingly quieted down a bit, but not completely. SOA also led to the software as a service (SaaS) trend, which triggered Microsoft's software plus services (S+S) push, but that was more of a side story. With everything moving to the web, backed by [typically open] services, asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) was the next big push. This was tied to the "Web 2.0" moniker, which I'd argue wasn't quite what Tim Berners-Lee intended. Either way, this led to the big push for better user experiences, which many people confuse with user interface design. The Web 2.0 push also kept the industry on its web focus, which is where we are left today.

It's easy to look back and see how we got here. Trends show that architectural changes typically take two or three years to gain momentum in the community, so we'll probably have a couple of years before the next major architecture peaks. The trend towards distributed computing has grown more and more, but I have a feeling things are going to start coming back a little. We've been pushing out to the web for a lot of reasons; one of which is the rise of the Mac. What we've been losing out on, however, is the power of the desktop. I see the S+S push to continue, but more as an underlying theme than a strong focus. Services will continue to be the foundation, maintaining the importance of cloud computing, but the desktop will be where the processing occurs. I see Silverlight proving a huge success, which will eventually bring .NET to the Mac. This will probably bring Novell and Microsoft a little closer together, with respect to Microsoft's relationship with Mono, but this may simply be a change in focus for Mono. Oh, and when I say, "bring .NET to the Mac," I'm not talking about the scaled-down version in Silverlight. I'm talking about the real deal. I see WPF and Silverlight merging along with the smart client architecture built into .NET today. This will take more than a few years, but it seems to be inevitable. Most likely, by the time all this happens, multi-core will be a way of life, as opposed to the we-should-be-thinking-about-threading thoughts most developers have today. Armed with a strong multi-threaded foundation, which is easy to use, the combined WPF/Silverlight presentation tier will quickly overtake Flash and Air. By this time, we should also start to see more integration into our everyday lives...

Okay, I'm probably getting a little out of hand here. If I go much further, we're going to be on the USS Enterprise, so I'll stop while I'm ahead. I'll just leave it at, it'll be interesting to see what's next. My money's on the power of the desktop, which we've lost over the past 10 years.

Nothing new here. After reading another tidbit on the latest 120 GB Zunes, I remembered an old post I had. Not that big of a deal, but I thought it was interesting to see my prediction come to light.

Here's some "Yellow Submarine" talk about the Xbox... by the way, if you didn't catch that reference, then you're missing out on Mac Break Weekly , which is entertaining to all. But, I digress... The Xbox 360 has been dropping its price over the past few months, it seems like. I look at this and think about how long it's been since there's been a serious upgrade and I have to wonder if we might be seeing the very typical price drop before a new release. I have absolutely 0 knowledge about anything related to the Xbox and don't even own one, but I do admit that I'd be very intrigued by a new platform... probably enough to actually go out and buy one, which means a lot to me since I'm not a gamer. We'll see. Supposedly there will be something coming out at E3.

Over the years, I've been asked to put together coding standards again and again. The nice thing about this is that it enables me to pull out the old docs and touch them up a little. A year or two ago, I heard something that made a lot of sense: developers never really read coding standards and, even if they do, they don't usually adopt them. Let's face it, if you don't adopt a standard as your own, you're not going to use it. The only way to ensure the standard is applied is to catch the problem before it gets checked in. I tried a VS add-in that attempted to do this as you type, but it wasn't quite as extensive as I want, but I grabbed onto the concept. For the past year, I've been wanting to start this and have finally decided to do it.

As I sat down and started to investigate writing custom code analysis rules, I asked myself how I was going to validate them. After hacking away at one approach after another, I started to realize I wasn't going to get very far. Apparently, with the latest releases of Visual Studio and FxCop, there's no way to create the objects used to represent code. After talking to the product team, the official position seems to be that, since custom rules aren't "officially supported," they're not going to support their testability. I'm not sure who made this decision, but I think it's a bad one. Of course, I say this without knowing their plans. Well, not completely, anyway.

It's not all bad news, however. It turns out there are hopes to start officially supporting custom code analysis rules in the next major release, Visual Studio 10. Nothing's being promised at this point, it's just something the team would like to deliver. I should also say that the upcoming Rosario release isn't the major release I'm referring to. I'm expecting Rosario to be a 9.1 release that will probably hit the streets in early 2009. That's a guess, tho. If that's true, the VS 10 release probably wouldn't be until 2011. All I can really say about it is that it'll be a very exciting release. I can't wait to get my hands on a beta. Speaking of which, some of the goals they have for the product will make beta testing much much easier... I'm talking about a hugely evolutionary change, if not revolutionary, considering where the product is today. That's all I can really say, tho.

Back to the point, since there's no realy testability of the code analysis framework, I decided to create my own object model. The part I'm missing, obviously, is the factory logic that converts code analysis types to my types. I'm hesitant about this approach, but it's working so far. Hopefully, I'll have something to deliver soon. I keep bouncing around, tho, so at this point, I want to deliver a release with only naming conventions. That release is mostly complete, I just need to get approval for a distribution mechanism. If I don't get that soon, I'll just release it on my site.

There's been a lot that's come out regarding the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7. Let me try to summarize what I've seen...

When it Will Release

First, let me touch on the release date, since that's been heavily debated. The initial speculation was that Windows 7 would be released in 2010. Later, rumors of a 2009 release cropped up. It wasn't too long until Microsoft released comments stating that Windows 7 would take three years to develop. Speculation from the field translated this to 2011 release. Of course, that was coupled with some doubt. As if that wasn't enough, Bill Gates recently stated that the team is targeting first quarter 2010. I'm sure the Windows team is slapping their heads wondering why he shared this, but it's too late, now. I believe the team has been purposefully quiet about the release for two reasons: (1) to ensure the release was on time; and, (2) to lessen the impact on Vista sales. I don't blame them. If you ask me, I think we'll be looking at an early 2010 release with hopes that it'll be ready in 2009. Of course, I have nothing to back that up, so it's merely a blind prediction.

How it Will Release

Microsoft has had a vision of releasing components of Windows independently for the past 6+ years. This was mainly related to the server operating system, but it's still a great feature for the client. With the software+services push, some are speculating there will be a piece-meal release methodology. I don't expect us to see this with Windows 7, but it's coming. There have also been rumors of subscriptions, which is another area Microsoft has been interested in for years. In my mind, this is more of an issue with society, than Microsoft. If the community would grasp the concept, Microsoft would definitely go there. I don't know if we'll see that in the next release or not, but it's another thing I see coming eventually.

What it Will Include

A while back, there were some hints to what was going to be included in Windows 7, but it now lookse the release is picking up a new set of pillars focused on design and usability: specialized for laptops, designed for services, personalized computing, optimized for entertainment, and engineered for ease of ownership.Taking it all in, the core concepts seem to be around ease of use, connected computing, and security -- pretty much taking the next step after Vista. I see this being evolutionary, as opposed to the revolutionary version of Windows I hoped this was going to be. I guess I can hold onto those hopes for the next release.

With an increasingly mobile workforce and consumer population, tuning the OS for laptops is going to be a big win. With this, they'll be looking at data security, responsiveness, touch/tablet interfaces, wireless connectivity, "on demand" access to all your information, and power management. Most of these are pretty obvious. The only one I had to take a second look at was "on demand" access. This is basically about either storing your information in the cloud or ensuring access to it, no matter where it may live. Windows Live is how we're going to get there. This pretty much says that Windows 7 will definitely have some Windows Live integration. I can already see the EU beckoning for "justice."

With the "on demand" component of the last pillar, we have a good transition into the second, designed for services. This one's obvious as well. Windows will focus on remaining up-to-date (as in with patches), worry-free upgrades, Windows online , help and community, family-friendly web experience, gadgets, and in-box application improvements. We already have most of what's here. I think the pillar is mostly about providing a more integrated experience. I am curious how Microsoft plans to achieve "worry-free upgrades." That's going a long way. Apple has that today, so it's not entirely out of the question, but I think Apple gets it thru customer confidence, not by technical prowess. Lastly, I'm interested in the application improvements. I've been using custom apps like Notepad2 and Paint.NET for a while now and it'd be nice to have something better than what was delivered in Windows 95 built-in. I heard about upgrades to these apps last year, but haven't seen what's come of that. The AeroExperience website posted these images. I hope this isn't it, tho. This is a bit minimal.

Personalized computing is something that will really bring Windows back to the consumer. To achieve this, Microsoft will target customization, internationalization, access anywhere, secure roaming, and home network management. Again, these are pretty self-explanatory.

The next pillar is about high definition graphics, media streaming, better playback, TV on Windows, and audio improvements. This is another area that is pretty much just enhancing what we already have today. I'm mostly interested in the TV on Windows scenario. This is already available, but very limited today. I consider this to be part of the Media Center vision, but Microsoft seems to have a few different products in the area. I hope there will be some consolidation here, but that may not make complete sense.

The last pillar is about ownership. Microsoft will put a strong emphasis on diagnostics and data recovery, lessening the fear of new applications by decreasing the need for administrative access, improved upgrade experience, administrative productivity and security enhancements, devices that "just work," quick/clean out-of-the-box experience, reduced management time/cost, and improved data security. We've seen a lot of improvements in this area with Vista and there's still some room to grow. If you haven't jumped on-board with Vista, you're in for a vastly improved experience and it looks like Windows 7 will be even better.

I'm excited about Surface, that's for sure. Powered by WPF, it's a great platform for some very cool apps. Despite the fact that other vendors are looking to dig into the space, nothing has really happened since Surface was initially announced. Things may be changing, tho. There's been a huge demand from the field and apparently Microsoft is looking to release Surface to consumers sooner than the 5 year estimate initially estimated. I can't say I'm surprised, but what that will really mean isn't very clear. If I had to guess, I'd say the first consumer version of Surface would arrive in 2010. The biggest blocker to getting it out sooner is the cost of hardware necessary to produce the large-scale graphics and touch capabilities.

I wrote this a month ago, so it may seem a little out of date. I figured I'd go ahead and post it anyway. If you haven't been following IE8 much, it'll still seem like new

Standards compliance has never really caught on with the vast majority of web developers. Since Firefox hit the streets, more developers have started to pay attention to the ideals behind web standards, but they still don't seem to be doing the work to achieve compliance. Admittedly, a lot of the problems were brought on by IE's acceptance of bad practices, but the root of the problem truly lies with developers. IE7 resolved a number of standards compliance issues, but unfortunately, it broke a number of sites built specifically for IE6 at the same time. IE8 tries to resolve this problem. Today, we can opt-in to standards by specifying a DOCTYPE, which indicates what version of what standard the developer intends for a page. The problem is that no browser to date implements any standard completely, so there's still a chance your page will render differently in browsers that "support" the desired standard. IE8 fixes this problem. How? By allowing developers to write pages for specific rendering engines (i.e. IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, or FF3). I love this idea, for obvious reasons.

With IE8 and Firefox 3 both passing the Acid2 test and Acid3 on its way, I think we're in very good standing. While I don't expect huge leaps and bounds between IE8 and 9, I think we're well on our way to some form of nirvana on the web. Hopefully, IE9 will come in the Win7 time frame, which I expect to be in 2009 or 10.

First off, I have to say this is completely off -the-cuff. I have no insight into the Zune team or its plans. This is one of those teams that keeps a lot to themselves. While I hate this because I'm just as curious as other consumers are, there's a time and place for any announcement, and it seems some teams are leaning towards less transparency than others to avoid over-promising and under-delivering. Anyway, Toshiba just announced the availability of 120 GB 1.8" hard drives. Seeing as tho Toshiba manufactures the Zune, I can only imagine this means we'll be seeing 120 GB Zunes this holiday season. Of course, there's always an option for those of us who are less patient. At first I was hoping this meant smaller Zunes, but it looks like they already use 1.8" drives.

If you're not familiar with the story behind Open XML to date, Rob Weir  of IBM has a decent overview. I'd be remissed if I didn't say he was somewhat biased, tho. An example of this is a comment he made about how he believes Microsoft will drive change in Open XML with every release of Office. This, in itself, shows how little he understands about the Open XML format and why its proponents believe in it as a superior format to ODF. I have no doubt Microsoft will try to push modifications as more and more customers ask for new and innovative features, but that's exactly why Open XML is better -- it was built with extensibility in mind, unlike ODF.

Here we are, waiting for the last leg of the process to kick off at the end of this month and some skeptics say, "While you're waiting [for the ISO decision on standardization], don't save in OOXML format." Should you listen? Probably not. There are some seemingly logical arguments behind the comment, but the position is flawed. He states that you should use the legacy binary formats to ensure a truly "open" experience. To word that another way, you should use a proprietary binary format instead of one based on open standards, such as ZIP and XML. I'm sorry, but I'll stick with my Open XML file formats, which I have full control over and can get data out should I need it, unlike formats like the legacy DOC and PDF formats, which require binary interpreters. I can get my data out of Open XML files without any document reader. I simply need a tool to extract the content and read text files -- not that I expect everyone to feel this way. Also, with more and more format converters out there, I fail to see the importance of constantly saving to a format your tool of choice doesn't natively support without translation. You'll get a much better experience working in native formats and only converting to another when you need to publish or share your content externally.

We're not looking at all bad news, tho. With the 3522 comments made on the original specification, most overlapping on similar concerns, 662 responses have been made. I don't know if there was truly that much overlap that would support 662 answers to 3522 comments, but you can browse the comments and responses online. In another attempt to ease the community into the new formats, Microsoft has also published the legacy binary formats.

What's perhaps more interesting is the fact that, in a truly independent study, the Burton Group  found Open XML to be a superior format. You can get that report online, but I doubt most people will see it. Perhaps developers at traditional Open XML opposing companies like IBM and Google read it, tho, seeing as their products seem to support the new formats. Of course, I think this is a must-have. You can't have a tool that neglects the native file format for the de-facto standard when it comes to productivity applications.

What do I expect? I expect the format to be approved. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a doubt in my mind, but the evidence is there that it's a superior format. The fact that these open source companies are so up-in-arms about Microsoft wanting to push its own formats thru the standardization process says something about their motives. Microsoft wants options and, with that, extensibility. If the format is judged on the merits, like all good arguments, the answer is clear. If you ask me, the worst thing about Open XML is Microsoft's name on it. If that weren't there, it'd already be a standard.

Just wanted to share some vulnerability stats from 2007 for Mac and Windows. Mac had 12 times the number of vulnerabilities that Windows Vista had and 5.5 times the number of combined Vista and XP vulnerabilities. At first I was surprised, but then I thought back to rumblings of insecurity and talk about Windows Vista being more secure than Mac OS before that. It's been nice to see the Mac security myth begin to fade away and watch as Microsoft's credibility around security grows. I expect this trend to continue thru the year; especially as more and more users are exposed to Mac's. And, yes, I do see Mac use growing this year. While I'm making predictions, I think I feel pretty comfortable saying Vista won't see the widespread adoption people seem to expect. This is ironic, considering it's truly the best version of the OS to date. Nevertheless, the reason I say that is because I expect to hear more and more talk of Windows "7" this year. I'm guessing that people who've hesitated to upgrade might prefer to see what's next, since there's talk about it being released in 2009. Microsoft is good at learning from its mistakes, so I think we'll see a very big boom when Windows "7" hits the streets.

Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X vulnerability stats for 2007
	XP	Vista	XP + Vista	Mac OS X
Total extremely critical	3	1	4	0
Total highly critical	19	12	23	234
Total moderately critical	2	1	3	2
Total less critical	3	1	4	7
Total flaws	34	20	44	243
Average flaws per month	2.83	1.67	3.67	20.25