As I sit here at my computer on yet another late night technical adventure, (although not really a late night as far as late nights go, (approx. 1am)), I find myself comtemplating the state of technology and the break-neck pace that things appear to be moving. It seems to me that everyday I come across some new and intriguing technology or some new idea that I am interested in. So, I do some research take some notes, try a few things to get better acquainted with my new found technical treasure and without delay, this new found treasure ends up being added to the pile of cool and interesting things that I “am going to spend time to learn more about“. When in reality, I know that I don’t have nearly enough time to get to the “COOL” stuff, let alone the everyday necessary activities. Although I shall never discard the pile of stuff to learn about, in hopes that someday I will be able to requisition for extra minutes in an hour, extra hours in a day, or maybe even an extra day in my week.

However until I am able to somehow accomplish that colossal task I am going to have to settle for cherry picking the technologies that I think have some good potential and look like they will have some great benefit in the future. So to reflect on that a little, I have come across a few technologies that I really like and plan to spend more time discussing in future posts. For now, I will just introduce!

First, and a fairly obvious choice, though it exist today, is generics. This technology has been needed in the dotnet framwork since the framework was first released. The idea of creating generic collections or datatypes instead of having to worry about casting and boxing and unboxing all the time is very intriguing and I am very pleased that it has made its way into the .NET 2.0 framework. So, I will be discussing that, along with some code, of course!!

Next, and probably one of the things that I am looking most forward to getting more familiar with is LINQ and its iterations. I think that the direction that Microsoft, with the tutelage of Anders, is taking data access and data manipulation in the future is going to make life easier and working with data a lot more attractive. I am really looking forward to having LINQ. For those not aware, LINQ is Language Integrated Query, which in its simplest form is making data access code, SQL and the Like, a first class citizen within a respective language, both VB.NET and C#. So I will be talking about that in the near future as well.

Another technology that I am excited about is ‘Sparkle’ or Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. Personally I like the name Sparkle better. Although this technology is not a tru developer tool, the promise that it shows for bridging the gap between UI design and Application development, I find very intriguing. So, I will discuss this as well.

So to end, I just want to say that I will be discussing and talking about various things; some technical, some not, some factual, some opinion and some just for fun. There will be many technical discussions, including but definitely not limited to the ones I mentioned here. I plan to rant a lot.

I’ll talk at ya’ later…..