With the Microsoft MIX conference just ending last week and product announcements happening with greater and greater regularity, it's sometimes discouraging when you think of how much work it will be to just keep up with it all.

Technology is moving faster and faster and we as professionals have to adapt in different ways than most people think. Through the years many of us have just jumped on the grenades and expanded our skill set to absorb new technologies as they become important. If you are as old as me you remember when you could actually have relative mastery over all the products that mattered in your world. Then things like Exchange came out and programmers learned how to code against it as a back end. The Web client meant learning how it ticked so you could incorporate it into an intranet. The SQL Server of the past was pretty much just a database, but now it is an analysis server and transaction broker and notification system...

I know this sounds like grousing, but it isn't. It just illustrates that as MS and other vendors release more and more products and stuff more and more features (mini products actually) into the old standards, we have to adapt. The medical industry did it years ago with the rise of the specialist. Technology people (both developers and infrastructure people) have to follow suit. With the release at MIX of Silverlight (formerly WPF/e) as well as the releases being made in other areas (see our articles in this issue about Portable .NET and the .NET Micro Framework) there are many exciting places to go, but remember that at the end of the day the job is to get stuff done. Be strategic on which technologies you as a developer dive deeply into since that is where you will have to be productive.

I think that ultimately this is a great time to be in dev since you can distinguish yourself in all kinds of ways, but beware trying to be the jack-of-all-trades. Unless you have a photographic memory and no life, you will end up the master of nothing.