Salon: All hail .Net! - We will all carry around hand-held computers that will allow us to access our e-mail, trade our stocks, send video and photos to the family and generally manage our daily lives. Those hand-helds will also be phones and navigation units, and will carry our electronic wallets. They'll communicate with our computers at home to manage the heating, order the groceries and, when we get home, set just the right ambience for that all-important date with a mix of appropriate mood lighting and Barry White.

 

Out of the box, Visual Studio.Net provides three of its own .Net-enabled development languages, but companies such as ActiveState are already hard at work making existing languages compatible with .Net as well

 

The key to Web services is the way they separate out, or "decouple," user interfaces from applications. Where a Web page provides a static interface to a snapshot of data, a Web service can provide the data itself. Completely devoid of a user interface, Web services enable the development of smart-client-based applications, applications that can detect the type of platform they are running on and then provide a user interface to suit.

 

As developers move to embrace .Net, the Internet will be transformed from a complex, un-standardized mishmash of awkward static views of data to a dynamic pool of data connected by a true web of Web services all working together to make your life easier.

 

.Net marks the dawn of the third age of computing -- embrace it.