>Although I am not sure if your first statement is 100% correct. M$ invents new technology every couple of years so "WPF is the way to go" might turn into "WPF are won't get updated by MS in the future" in no time {g}.
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>Keep in mind how long WinForms was maintained by MS.
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>There is a philosophy in this industry that one should be learning a new technology every 6-9 months. The advantage is that the person becomes so accustomed to managing change that they've incorporated it into their thought process.
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>Suppose you managed a vertical market application, and you have a few dozen customers. You will want your customers to be running the most recent version in production. When customers demand enhancements, you surely will only want to place those enhancements in the most recent code base. Imagine if your customers squaked about upgrading to version 5.0 of your product, citing some of the same logic being used here.
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>Do I think that Microsoft's direction results in some pain and complication of developer's lives? Sure. But I see signs that they are headed in a direction of simplifying (relatively) their product offerings. Often my observation is that they generally go through a 3-phase evolution:
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>- Implement functionality and release
>- Greatly enhance that functionality in response to customer demands and release
>- Fine tune and clean up any integration issues and release one last time
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>It can be a 12/18 months or even years to go through those iterations.
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>I'm drifting somewhat here, but my point is that it's helpful to step back and look at the bigger picture of what they're trying to accomplish.

Every 6-9 months? That seems a little extreme.