As I listened to Bill Gates speak at the Office Developer's Conference in Redmond last week, I couldn't help but think how far Microsoft has come in terms of developer access to the Office Suite of products and how the Smart Client Revolution was in full force.

I started my "Smart Client Jihad" in May of 2003 in my presentation at the European launch of Visual Studio .NET. It seems like yesterday in some respects and I'm shocked that it was almost three years ago as I have spoken and written on Smart Client technologies over a hundred times since. Honestly, helping to boldly predict the Smart Client Revolution back then was a bit of a stretch for those of us involved and I most certainly could see a few raised eyebrows when talking to developer audiences about it. At the time, like many, I was privy to the master plan for Whidbey. I knew that .NET 2.0 with ClickOnce and some other important technologies would eliminate the last remaining hurdle to the Smart Client Revolution - deployment. Still, if you had asked me five years ago when .NET shipped if we'd be writing managed code applications and manifesting their user interfaces in Office applications, I would have said, "No way. That's ridiculous. I have enough controls available to me that I could build my own office-like custom application." I'm guessing you would have said the same thing. What I didn't realize is the sheer developer productivity we get with products such as Visual Studio Tools for Office. If I had to create a pivot table in Excel through the menus in the Excel interface, I'd probably flail in help for four hours and give up; most likely, it's the same for many of you. I'm not an advanced Excel user by any stretch, but with VSTO I can build a pivot table with four lines of managed code. They are complex lines of code, but the simple fact that I can do it in four lines of .NET is a testament to the technology. It just shows how far we've come in the .NET developer ecosystem.

I didn't have the foresight though to predict the SharePoint hysteria we are currently seeing; there is tremendous SharePoint adoption in the industry right now. Who would have thought that Microsoft could build a portal application on top of the .NET and Windows plumbing that would do so darn well?

Think about how well Microsoft responds to competition - through the years, they seem to always respond with a revolutionary version of a product. Microsoft Office definitely has rival companies out there in the marketplace. The 2007 Microsoft Office System (which includes Office 12, the new SharePoint Portal Server, the new Content Management Server, and a slew of other great client and server products) looks like one of those revolutionary product suites, the exact type of suite of products that Microsoft responds well to competitors with.

The application development platform war is over - for all intents and purposes - and the good guys won. You can see that in the latest research numbers of the IDC Website (www.idcresearch.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=34554). .NET adoption is dominating across the board, across the world.

However, it's not all bliss in the .NET world, of course. Microsoft doesn't seem to be close to a company-wide strategy for managed code interfaces to their products. It seems so clear to me that this is what is so desperately needed for the longevity and dominance of .NET. Unfortunately, many server products are still "black boxes" as it relates to application programming interfaces. What we really need, as developers, is for the executive management at Microsoft to step in and demand that each product team have a managed code interface strategy in place within six months for every one of their products.

We are developers, which means we are never inherently satisfied with the API access to the Microsoft stack. We always want more. Is that so wrong? Is that too much to ask? I think not.