As avid readers of Slick Thoughts (all three of you) remember well, my thought provoking post about what the Avalon roadmap meant to the timing of VS.Next appeared to be a cunning insight on the impact of a late VS.Next release would mean to Avalon development and adoption.

I was quite proud of my Sherlock Holmes like analysis and was lamenting what looks like a two year or more wait between VS.NET 2005 and VS.Next with several guys at the Heartland DC reception party. Among them was 'sharp as a tack' Nick Parker. The conversation with Nick went something like this:

Jeff: Avalon is cool. Too bad VS.Next will follow so far behind its release. Lack of tool support will suck. Probably slow adoption.

Nick: Well, it is likely that 3rd parties will create cool tools for Avalon and XAML development.

Jeff: Ughhhhhh... yeah. But you think Microsoft would want to have something sooner rather than later.

Nick: Well, if you had really thought about it rather than just whipped out some "look how smart I think I am when I write something on the fly" blog entry you would have realized that Microsoft will be able to look at all these 3rd party tools and take all the feedback and cool features and deliver a really cool dev experience in VS.Next.

Jeff:Ohhhh, yeah. Right.

Nick: Microsoft does that all the time. It's kind of their modus operandi.

Jeff: Ummmmmm... right again.

Nick: Kind of obvious really. Do you really work for Microsoft?

Jeff: Not for much longer.

Ok... so maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but Nick made some great points and maybe a year delay between Avalon's release and VS.Next is not as bad as it seems. You meet a lot of smart people and Nick is certainly one of them.