For a Friday opinion topic, this one is quite heavy, but is one that is on the minds of most people who do application development or intend to do app development for a career or part thereof.

Right now, its easy to see what the immediate future is, well at least in the Microsoft space anyway. Vista, WPF, Office 2007. Net 3.0, and Atlas cover a broad spectrum, but they are technologies which are all evolutionary and basically improve upon (greatly) what we have today.

There is a better than good chance that these technologies (in a yet more evolved form) will exist in the 10-20 year time period. What I think we will see is a convergence, or at least an attempt at convergence, of these development paradigms.

With web apps, desktop apps, mobile apps, you start doing development with that express target in mind. What may happen (or at least what would be nice to happen) is something like the images shown below:

You can see a smart tag indicating what output targets to specify: WPF, WPF/E. Atlas, or Automatic. The image is shown on a control, but I see this type of indicator on a higher level item like a page/form or at the global application level. Just think, have the default setting of automatic, throw on some controls, and you have compatible interfaces for standard web browsers (Atlas), plug-in enhanced browsers, IE version 8/9 or mobile (WPF/E), and Windows forms/desktop apps (WPF). The markup for all these technologies is looking more similar as they progress so a commonality is already there. Yes there will obviously be restrictions on what can be done on different output targets but there is definitely the potential to do this to some degree and depending on the evolution of the browser, who knows what can be done in that timeframe.

I have only provided a short glimpse on what I think development will be in the future, and I’ll be interested to see what Geoff and Damian have said.

What's your opinion?