Okay, here is to a bit of chest thumping (Sorry, but I just had to).

But, I told you so, on two points -

1. SharePoint: I said on Dotnetrocks, and otherwise - SharePoint is a game changer. Many still choose to live in the denial phase. But did you hear?  "Office Live Workspace is built on WSS 3.0". Don't believe me? Go read this - Update to Office Live Workspace

2. Microsoft's data access story: About 2 years ago, when I first played with DLINQ (now rechristened to LINQ to SQL), I basically flat out said - This is for RAD development/prototyping - not good enough for production environments. To be very specific, I had said ...

".... where your  logical model could be sufficiently disjoint from the conceptual model. So DLINQ (now LINQ to SQL) was ideal for situations where your logical model was very close to the conceptual model. Of course, you had better chances of finding a hot bikini model who was also a C++ programmer, than to find an application where the logical and conceptual model would be the same....".

I also expressed a more comprehensive opinion not too long ago.

It's interesting to see that 2 years later, things haven't changed much.

So, going forward, here are some of my predictions -

1. Silverlight 2.0 - will be good, but not the game changer MSFT would like you to believe it will be. There is one huge HUGE missing peice in silverlight - SEO. It just doesn't make sense to have web presence without SEO, and silverlight doesn't give you that. I just don't see silverlight taking over the game from HTML unless search engines figure out silverlight, or silverlight figured out SEO - both tough problems to solve.
2. SharePoint vNext - Will blow your mind. Thats all for now. More later.
3. ADO.NET eF - Will receive significant criticism, but will become the de facto way we write applications going forward.
4. Demise of technical books - This will be preceeded with detoriating quality of content in newer books/lack of brand new technology books. With due respect to current authors, writing books is way too much work than worth the return. I have all the respect for guys who are willing to write a 800 pager, but the best and established authors have simply given up on this medium. The only way to save technical books is, $200 for a book, increase royality % from 2% to 75%, color print with rich formatting ... OR ... ebook standardization with 50% royalty with a self-publishing model and much lower cost/entry point.

While I am on the topic of predictions, here are a few more I have for the year 2013:

1. Someone would have created a good eBook reader by then.
2. We will still be driving gasoline powered vehicles, gas will be even more expensive.
3. Apple will not be an uber-loved company by then. Though it would have grown bigger, and it's protectionist policies will come under fire.
4. Microsoft will be very very different in 5 years. It will still be around, and it will still be very major.
5. Real skills, including IT, will continue to be valuable.
6. A large percentage of you, reading my blog, will have a heartattack due to your unbalanced lifestyle. There will be a resurgence of better lifestyle in now more seasoned IT developers.
7. My home PC will have a curved display - similar to 3 X 30" LCDs curved around me.
8. Bluetooth ear buds for music.
9. Our taxes will be much higher.
10. The president will still suck.