In our first 20 years  in print, we have covered a lot of new product releases. Back in the 1980s and 1990s it was a series of OSs that drove developer innovations. However, in the past five years the programming landscape has changed. And we're not even talking about that new version of MSN Messenger that lets you send "winks" to your friends when they're trying to do work! (Oh good, three chimps in diapers dancing to "Stars And Stripes Forever." How witty.)

The release of major computing products, and by extension the learning cycles of cutting-edge developers, tend to ebb and flow. If you've been around the world of programming for a while, you surely recognize the buildup to a new release.

In the past, this cycle of software releases has coincided with major new versions of Windows. When Windows 3.0 hit the shelves, for instance, coders had to adapt to its new UI and multitasking schemes. After catching up with the new features of this milestone release, developers had some time to gear up and understand all the new stuff in Windows 95—notably, the widespread adoption of 32-bit computing. Windows 2000 and Windows XP each brought stages of evolution, spawning new products that took advantage of each operating system's additional functionality. In each instance, a new version of the Microsoft development tools (now known as Visual Studio) arrived to allow developers to take advantage of the innovations in the operating system.

Then came the .NET Framework. For the first time in recent memory, the usual sequence of operating system followed by products was broken, since the Framework isn't specifically tied to a single release of Windows. In fact, the common language runtime (CLR) is platform-neutral. What you see happening this autumn is a continuation of this new trend, with major products being released in the middle of the operating system lifecycle.

This November, Microsoft is releasing Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. This is timed to take advantage of the .NET Framework 2.0, which will first ship as part of Visual Studio 2005. The Framework will enable technologies such as ASP.NET 2.0. As an extension of IIS, this provides better functionality to the OS.

You've no doubt seen the advance coverage of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 that we've been running in MSDN Magazine over the past year. It's always been our core mission to provide the information that gives you an edge in the world of coding, but the way we've accomplished this has been shifting.

Back in the days when we were Microsoft Systems Journal, we were about operating systems. We would cover the OS in terms of the C language, or even assembler when appropriate. Today we still provide unparalleled coverage of the underlying operating system, but the majority of our readers now use higher-level languages. Over the years we have covered the OS, but in ways that make the internals easier to understand and use—MFC, ATL, and the .NET Framework, not to mention languages like Visual Basic and C#.

In the past five years, we've reached a point where the tools used to take advantage of the operating system have become powerful enough to stand on their own and advance the cause of programming with their own innovations. In the days of MSJ, anticipation would build as we delved, step-by-step, into the uncharted waters of an operating system. We would look at how to program in 32-bit space, for instance, or how to take advantage of COM+.

This doesn't mean that OSs are stagnant, of course. Windows XP made great strides in security and manageability, and we're sure Windows Vista (formerly codenamed "Longhorn") will as well. We will focus on Windows Vista over the next several months as beta versions become publicly available. On the server side, we will also be covering the product that is currently codenamed Windows Longhorn Server.

Today, developers don't just wait around for the next operating system. They use their OS release downtime to get familiar with the programming tools themselves. Systems programmers have never had it so good.

Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Matt Ayers, Christopher Brumme, Kathleen Carey, Alessandro Catorcini, Bruce Dawson, Scott Densmore, Joe Duffy, Dave Fetterman, Eric Fitzgerald, Tanveer Gani, Kit George, Brian Grunkemeyer, Jim Hogg, Francois Liger, Tian Lim, Yung-shin Lin, WeiWen Liu, Phil Lucido, Rudi Martin, Anthony Moore, Vance Morrison, Andrew Pardoe, Joel Pobar, Peter Provost, Dmitry Robsman, Jay Roxe, Tarek Mahmoud Sayed, Stefan Schackow, Jason Shirk, Kieran Snyder, Shawn Steele, Michel Suignard, Maura Van Der Linden, and Ting-Hao Yang.