I was pretty excited about the upcoming AZGroups event with Scott Guthrie next week, but when I started reading about VS 2010 beta 1 released yesterday and some of the .NET 4.0 features I had a flashback about something I said in 2006, but first check out this quote by Kathleen Dollard** in her recent blog entry:
".NET 4.0 is likely to offer patterns that will be the most important change in my coding since the huge changes brought on by LINQ (and supporting techniques like extensions and lambdas) of .NET 3.5. That was the most important change to my coding since generics in .NET 2.0. That was the most important change to my coding style since strongly typed full OO programming came on in .NET 1.0. That was the most important change to my coding style since the visual coding style of Visual Basic (pre .NET). That was the most important change to my coding style since Clipper and FoxPro. Get the trend? Eight years, eight years, three years, two years, 18 months... I do a talk for INETA called "Rethinking Object Orientation" that tries to get a grip on these changes... .NET 4.0 is going to bring a lot and inspire a lot of rethinking.
...
The most important feature of .NET 4.0 is Windows Workflow 4.0."
I think she's exactly right. When I first started looking at WF at the end of 2006, I said the following in a blog post:
"...I believe WF has the potential to further revolutionize software development by allowing designers to extract hard-coded business logic from their applications..."
Unfortunately WF was really difficult to use, but if they've solved that problem with this complete re-write, I think it's going to be another thing that we'd be unwise to ignore (similar to what I said about LINQ) as it will become a part of every developer's world.
I hope Scott Guthrie spends some time talking about WF next week.
-Nick
** I first saw Kathleen at DevConnections in Vegas a year or so ago and she stood out to me as a very level headed and practical developer/architect and I have a lot of respect for her assessments.