Long-term .NET plan (or roadmap)?

Question

Does anyone know what is the Microsoft perception for the .NET future?

Being mostly based on Delphi microISV shop I know that Delphi's future is uncertain but a few milestones are already announced in their roadmap:

• support x64 bit
• building native executables for Mac
• building Linux native executables
• QT bindings for VCL replacement
• DataSnap enhancements

Is there (even vague) plan that Microsoft follows for the .NET. It tried googling but it seems that I am not using the right keywords.

Any insight can be of help to me?

Answer 1

I'd recommend watching Anders Hejlsberg's speach at PDC on Thursday, Oct. 28 titled "The Future of C# and Visual Basic."

This should provide you some idea of where the main languages related to .NET are heading. It will be broadcast live, as well.

Luca Bolognese did a similar talk at last year's PDC which demonstrated some their plans for this as of last year. Much of this talk was based on post-.NET 4 features.

Answer 2

Here's the thing. All the things you mention for Delphi's "roadmap" are things that they've simply said they want to address in a future version, without real promises.

In my opinion, .net has matured to the point that there is nothing major missing. All new features will be esoteric things and more refinements. Also, stuff like WCF, EF, WF, etc.. will grow and add more features, but the base .NET vm is likely going to stay where it's at for at least 5-10 years. In fact, most new technologies will likely be "out of band" shipments, like MVC3. I suspect we'll see Entity Framework 3 (or 5, however you want to call it) ship before the next version of VS.

But yeah, this is all speculation. The answer is "Microsoft is a mysterious beast, and don't expect anything like a "roadmap" until it's close to beta."