It just occurred to me today, after reading the Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap, that many of the cool things like Indigo, XAML, Avalon, WinFS are all things way down the road.  Remember way back when it was announced that Whidbey (now Visual Studio .NET 2005) would have all these cool features?  Probably the most impressive one was the SQL Hosted CLR so that we can write Stored Procs and Triggers in .NET code.  This was incredibly delayed from what I have heard from MS because VS.NET 2005 had to release in parallel with the next SQL release (YUKON).  YUKON, while worth the wait, has taken the SQL team at MS 5 years since their last release! 

The problem is that the technologies that I mentioned in the beginning of this post are being shown on MSDN TV and The .NET Show.  They are being pumped into the development community in conferences, etc.  But these things will not be released for a while.  The next version of Visual Studio (Orcas) is due out with the next version of Windows (Longhorn).  They are interdependent because the OS needs to change to provide WinFS and Avalon.  I hope that MS realizes that XAML and Indigo are too important of technologies to wait for the Windows team (who will undoubtedly be late) to release Longhorn.  We need these technologies today.