(SYS-CON Media) – I am often struck by how good some ideas are and often wonder whether they are happened upon by accident (dumb luck), like the discovery of Teflon and penicillin, or whether there was just a really good idea that made it happen. I think what we are seeing in the evolution of .NET is a bit of both. .NET has arrived in my opinion. I base this on the really powerful community I see surrounding it, especially from where I sit here in the North East just north of Boston.

I also note that the conversations have ended that contain the often-heard phrase, "If .NET really catches on." It has caught on and in my world, at least, it is dominating projects due to productivity and innovation.

Some of that innovation comes from Microsoft (thankfully) as evidenced by our upcoming calendar for 2007, which is brimming with new technologies and better ways of doing things, but it also is that we are seeing massive innovation from partners and the open structure. In this issue alone we have articles about using Oracle and other databases with .NET front ends quite nicely, and information about interesting things that partners are doing to make solutions easier then ever. We aren't quite at the age of development where you describe the app and out it comes, but life is quite a bit better for a developer than it was a decade ago.

The idea I alluded to earlier that impresses me was the idea of starting a technology and putting enough hooks in it so that the world can just run with it. I am not talking about open source, but about the same approach that Windows followed of putting out a platform with standard services. .NET has become the same for us.

I expect this next year to be a big one for .NET Developer's Journal. We are bringing out the big guns like never before and you can expect more content from names you know and trust on topics you really want to hear about. It is an exciting time in technology and I really think it will be an exciting time for our readers.