DLR - The tipping point for the .NET Platform?

Some interesting thoughts on what the future of the .NET platform might hold. I agree Dynamic Language Runtime(s) will see lots of attention over 2008, and we've been here already with much of the activity on the Java platform over the past few years - Groovy and JRuby to name but a few. Outside of these, there are some obvious candidates that could find themselves under the spot light of DLR spot light, but these technologies that have the weight of support of Redmond should be watched closely.

Perhaps this will even help us get to the point where by developers, architects alike to compare managed run times across what should be regarded as key assets: cross-platform availability, runtime performance and ease of development.

Highlights & Low-lights in Data Access for 2007

Generally speaking most prominent bloggers exercise their inalienable right to post their predictions for 2007. Instead, this year I think its useful to look back on the past 12 months to review the technology and software highlights and lowlights from the perspective data access, and XML ...

First the highlights (in no particular order) ...

• LINQ
• Entity Framework
• JPA 2.0
• Astoria (Now LINQ to Data Services)
• OpenJDK
• XQuery reaches recommendation at the W3C !
• Google Guice
• JSR-310 Date and Time API

And inevitable low-lights

• LINQ to SQL
• Connectors 1.6
• Closures in Java reaching analysis paralysis
• JLINQ misbranding