New this new that new the next thing, what the heck are Microsoft playing at. I dont understand is how companies can decide on various MS technologies and not feel that their stuff is going to be instantly outdated and lacking in support. For instance C# 3.0 was announced and previewing stuff before 2.0 was out!

Dewd,

IIS7 is a long awaited re-architecting of IIS. Remember IIS6 shipped with Windows 2003 which shipped in erm...2003. IIS 7 is part of Longhorn/Vista which isn't due to ship until 2007. That's four years between products which is a shedload of time in the IT industry. The .NET 1.x environment shipped in Feb 2002 and 2.0 shipped in November 2005...that's nearly four years which again is a long lifetime for the 1.x product. C#2.0 was revealed in 2002 as well. The reason for such early previews is to allow the industry to feedback to vendors such as MS the things they'd like to see in future releases and to permit regression testing with existing production code. i.e. will my site provisioning scripts break in IIS7?

I for one (working for a hosting company and having to deal with IIS where we host 700-800 sites per shared server) look forward to many of the forthcoming changes and new features in IIS7. Also most of this stuff is backwards compatible (because of early previewing and community testing) so you only start to use the new stuff when you become familiar with it.

Kev

I wasn't really having a go at IIS, more of a general across the board thing. All I'm trying to get at is that if I was a non-tech savvy type looking to possibly replace an old IT system with something shiny and new, I'd be miffed if it was out of date before it was all up and running.

Another random (and much slower) example is lets say you have an SME and you absolutely had to upgrade the OS on every PC in the office for some reason (say 100 PC's) to XP. Then (eventually) Vista ships and Microsoft start dropping off the support for XP to encourage everyone to move to Vista.

At the rate the non-OS related software and dev tools are coming out of MS it seems no matter what you go for you are going to end up getting into that support riding in to the sunset feeling much sooner than your wallet wants to.

Mind you, this is the writing of a techy out of the loop looking in, so feel free to take what I say with a pinch (or bucket) of salt.