One day you're sitting there, making plans for the summer. Maybe a weekend at the beach house, lazy afternoons by the pool, languid days spent picking wildflowers in the bountiful meadow surrounding our new offices in midtown Manhattan. And then the next day, you turn around and find out that there was no summer. It never got above 56 degrees, it rained every day, the pool was broken, whenever you flushed the beach house toilets the sink overflowed with sea water, and the wildflowers (which were admittedly quite nice because of all the rain) were off limits due to an infestation of West Nile virus-carrying mosquitos, which were there because it rained every day. Then we had to board up the meadow because of the hurricane that never made it this far north. And before we could even unpack our sweaters, we looked up and realized that we're putting the last issue of the year to bed.

Despite the Bummer Summer, 2003 has had many bright spots in the world of programming. We've seen product releases, including Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003. We've seen announcements of some exciting new products as well. Microsoft Windows code-named "Longhorn" was announced, as was the next version of SQL Server code-named "Yukon." There was even an announcement about the next release of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework code-named "Whidbey." In addition, this year has seen the wider adoption of key programming concepts (the .NET Framework and XML Web Services) and, most importantly, an upturn in programming and consulting.

We do have a lot of new products to cover in 2004. Look for special issues on Longhorn and Yukon early next year. But we're going to be covering a lot of other topics that go beyond mere product features. Some of these concepts have been discussed in Editor's Notes in 2003.

Security  More than ever, security has been on our minds. We've increased our attention to detail in the magazine to make sure that the samples we bring you are clean and no little security gotchas (like using sa with a blank password) are hiding within.

Best practices  As you probably know, there's usually more than one way to accomplish a programming task. The difference between a novice and an expert is often determined by how efficient and sensible their coding solutions are. Best practices represent a generally agreed-upon set of methods that is commonly considered to be the "best" available way to accomplish a programming task. We put our articles through a series of reviews in order to ensure that, as much as possible, each sample and discussion represents the best practices associated with the methods that these articles are designed to demonstrate.

Testing  No matter how good a programmer you are, bugs can and will appear in your work from time to time. Expert developers must also be expert testers. We've talked about testing techniques in past issues, and we'll be devoting more space to modern testing and debugging techniques.

Scalability  This topic hasn't received enough coverage because it's a tricky subject. But as you know, once something goes live on the Internet, it's difficult to control its load factor. Designing apps for scalability involves elements of both best practices and testing.

Of course, we'll also have the inside track on all of these new developer products upcoming in 2004 and beyond:

Yukon  The next version of SQL Server will feature common language runtime (CLR) integration, enhanced XML functionality, an extended T-SQL language, and lots of productivity enhancements. Watch this space for more information soon or check out http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/yukon.asp.

Whidbey  The next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will add CLR and language innovations like generics, as well as deeper integration into Yukon. And edit and continue debugging will be reintroduced!

C++  Although this is part of the Visual Studio "Whidbey" release, it merits its own mention here. Visual C++ in Whidbey will provide C++-specific constructs to access capabilities like generics, as well as core library enhancements. Two notable features include support for Windows Fusion, which makes it easier to deploy DLLs for native applications, and Profile Guided Optimizations (POGO), which is a new technology for instrumenting applications so that Visual C++ can optimize code based on usage patterns.

Of course, we have more surprises up our sleeves. As soon as we figure out what they are, you'll hear all about them. Weather-wise, this summer might've been a crushing disappointment, but we're going to make up for it with a lot of hot topics in 2004.