Visual WebGui

Visual WebGui (VWG) is an open source rapid application development (RAD) framework for Line-Of-Bussines AJAX & Silverlight GUIs. VWG cuts down development time (proven up to 90%) , without compromising on extensibility, scalability, performance, security or complexity.

Visifire

Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft^® Silverlight^™. With Visifire you can create and embed visually stunning animated Silverlight Charts within minutes. Visifire is easy to use and independent of the server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. Don't take our word for it! Visit Visifire Gallery or design your own chart using Chart Designer.

Microsoft's Developer Tools Roadmap

Future versions of Visual Studio will focus on Silverlight and better team development. Version 2.5 of Expression Studio and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 support Silverlight 2.0, Microsoft's platform for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). A major update to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, code-named Rosario, will then bring improved support for software testing.

Farther out, a new version of Visual Studio (not officially named, but called Visual Studio 10 here) will support the Oslo wave of new messaging and workflow technologies, which should also get support in the .NET Framework and Team Foundation Server.

Source:
http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/

Microsoft's Data Access Technologies Roadmap

The .NET Framework replaced a series of data access APIs with ADO.NET. ADO.NET 2.0 brought improved access to third-party database formats along with support for asynchronous and batch updates to databases. In 2007, Microsoft introduced a new version of ADO.NET designed to support Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), a set of new programming language features coming in VB.NET and C# that allow developers to express database queries directly in the programming language instead of having to mix SQL syntax into their programs.

2008 will bring new data access technologies on top of the ADO.NET API. These include the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which enables developers to use entity data modeling to simplify maintenance and improve portability of data access code, and ADO.NET Data Services, which makes data from SQL Server, and potentially other databases, accessible via standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests using data formats common with the increasingly popular REST style of Web service.

Source:

http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com

Microsoft's Presentation Technologies Roadmap

2007 brought updates for a number of important presentation technologies, including Windows Vista, which contains the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Visual Studio 2008, which includes a new version of Windows Forms, and an updated Visual Studio Tools for Office for building Office-based clients. Also released in 2007 was Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft's new platform for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which uses a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation for UI design and is primarily designed to support digital video. Silverlight 2.0, which is likely to appear by the end of 2008, will be the first version of the platform to support programming with .NET Framework languages rather than JavaScript.

Major updates to presentation technologies are likely with the next versions of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio (not officially named, but called .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 10 here), but details have not been released. InfoPath will also probably receive a major update (called InfoPath 14 here) in 2009 with the next major release of the Office suite.

Source:

http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com