>You're right...it is a long way out before release, but is there any difference between this and people getting excited about new cars coming out next year? If you're into cars, you still want to know what's coming.
True, but what I'm seeing is that a lot of people are now looking at VS7 like - let's put off what we've been working on until that stuff comes out cause it will be so much
, which I think is not a good thing to do given the path of technology maturation dates and the whole 'demo hype' nature of what's been shown so far.
>I also want to know what areas I should be studying today to help me leverage what's coming down the road. One of the questions raised is, "Will VFP 7.0 support COM+?" If it will, I want to learn about it today. There are other similar questions about technologies. Should we learn about some of them anyway? Probably so. (In my case I *have* to learn about them).
More than anything XML will be important - that much should be obvious. Whether you plan on going full hog with the MS next generation stuff or whether you want to roll your own (which is basically what i do), XML will be important. XML BTW, makes this interoperability possible which is important. It may also mean that the MS lock on new technology won't be guaranteed because it's relatively easy to build totally custom implementations.
COM+ is not really new. COM+ is just a new name for MTS and Windows 2000 provides a few additional services ontop of that concept (like COM+ events, and queued components). Understanding COM and MTS and MSMQ and what they can and can't do are still the most important things to know IMHO. Some of the new abstracted features are very cool and useful, but at this time VFP can't play.
I can tell you this though: It's very frustrating trying to learn about the new stuff right now. Lots of books out there - most don't deal with the new features at all but are rehashes of existing books with a few additional notes for COM+. The MS documentation (as usual) sucks and is wrong in many places. Some things you can't get any information on anywhere and some of the new services don't work as they're supposed to.
Case in point I've written an article on the Windows 2000 AS Network Load Balancing service (you can find it on my articles site). There were a number of bugs and problems that cropped up and it was next to impossible to get any information on the service. THere's no support, no documentation and not even any peer support (no peers - or very few anyway)...
In time this will surely fill in, but it's an interesting time we're in right now. Wihtout some help from inside of MS it'd be awfully hard to get some of the required information to make many of these things work (and even with it that's not always guaranteed to be successful either).
Sad as it seems the best source for info at the moment seems to be magazines like MSDN and VBPJ because of the heavy Microsoft presennce in those magazines...
