Jon Honeyball speculates on .NET's direction. As I have been postulating for a while in my columns in PC Pro, Microsoft needs to complete its storage story. It has too many ways of storing relatively similar items, and a simplification is long overdue.
This is coming, and it lays the roadmap for the major changes for the next 4-5 years of Windows operating system changes. From the users' perspective, the changes will be small or even invisible – Microsoft is a past master of changing things only as quickly as the majority of the user base can manage.
From a technical perspective, the changes are quite profound. They focus on four main areas: Active Directory, SQL Server, Exchange Server and then the file system itself. As you will see, there is a clear interweaving of the changes to both BackOffice products, and to the base OS.