Windows Vista is going to provide an immense amount of opportunity for developers. It's going to be a real shakeup for existing developers too.  The reason I say that is that Windows Vista might as well be simply called VistaOS or something because it's a totally different ball game now.

Windows NT 3.1 was released in 1994. Microsoft gave it a new shell and moved the video drivers into Ring 0 and called it Windows NT 4.0 in 1996.  In 2000, Microsoft further refined it, made it more user friendly and called it Windows 2000.  A year later, they skinned it, changed the icons and called it Windows XP.

Building for the future..

Over the past 4 years, Microsoft has looked at where technology is going.  They needed to start replacing basic parts of the OS that were just antiquated at this point.  GDI? A 2D drawing system whose roots were based on the IBM VGA graphics specification (16 colors).  They've patched it up a bit with GDI+ but really, it has no concept of 3D, alpha blending, shaders, etc.  The networking in Windows XP is still based on a hodge podge of networking APIs that were built before over-wedgified losers made us learn words like "worms" and "malware" and "phishing".  So Microsoft developed a managed API called .NET and a new communications foundation code-named Indigo.

You put all that together and you have a pretty damn impressive OS.  On top of that, Microsoft is doing their usual bundle mania which tends to get on my nerves but monopolies do what monopolies can.

To support the new technologies, Microsoft is also creating some pretty impressive development tools.  Sparkle looks simply ingenius.  Let designers do their thing with Sparkle and hand over the XAML it creates to the developer using Visual Studio and they can do their logic behind it.  Microsot is really pushing Windows developers to stop making software that looks like..well crap.  Sparkle and the rest of the Expression Suite seems designed to do that.

Developer Opportunities

As a software developer -- a commercial software developer at that. My job is to figure out how best to take advantage of these new technologies.

In my mind, getting the most out of Microsoft's strategy involves leveraging two things:

Number one, it means making products that allow existing Windows XP users to be able to have some of the more obvious benefits of Windows Vista without being on Windows Vista.  There's plenty of reasons to upgrade to Windows Vista when it comes out, but users who elect to stay with Windows XP (and indeed, it'll be quite awhile before Windows Vista is out) should have some cool stuff to use.

To that end, we're working on WindowBlinds 5, WindowFX 2.5, and DesktopX 3 Pro:

These technologies will show up in the next month in the overall suite call Object Desktop.  Specifically, the Aero glass type technology will be available to WindowBlinds 5 users (beta due out this month).  We've got a bunch of skins in development that take advantage of the new glass technology in WB.  WindowFX is going to provide improved shadow support windows, an alternative Alt-Tab mechanism and window previews for minimized programs.  And DesktopX is going to evolve to more closely align itself with Microsoft's gadget mechanisms.  Gadgets created with DesktopX Pro will hence work on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP.

Secondly, it means taking advantage of the new technologies in Windows Vista to create new kinds of software.  In our view,  the Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) is particularly promising for creating several new programs to put into Object Desktop. And best of all, Microsoft is committed to bringing WPF back to Windows XP so those users won't be left out.   Stardock is already working on a couple of new programs to be made part of Object Desktop that will heavily leverage WPF and WCF (Indigo).

Which leaves us with the marketing question? When will Windows Vista be released?  Our guess: October 2006.