My, how Microsoft’s tools garden has grown! Not long ago, the only choice facing development teams was, “Which language do I use with Visual Studio?” Now, it can be daunting simply deciding among Visual Studio versions, never mind auxiliary tools such as Expression or Popfly.

The key to navigating Microsoft’s tool chains is to remember always that the overarching goal of Microsoft’s developer division is to increase the percentage of worldwide development being done for Microsoft platforms. Profit would be nice, but it is definitely a secondary concern. Microsoft has an imperative to provide tools for every kind of programmer, from C developers targeting Windows Mobile to newcomers mashing up “hello” and “world.” Making the problem of focus even harder, everyone has an opinion but no one truly knows how software development is going to evolve in the coming decade—with devices proliferating, the Internet becoming ever more accessible, and chips moving into the multicore era. The result of that uncertainty is a plethora of new programming languages and “Windows X Foundation” APIs whose ultimate success is not yet known.