Just finished reading two great articles about the past, history, and the future.
The first article is from Joel Spolsky (Strategy Letter VI) and how history tends to repeat itself. Starting there, and with some extrapolation from performance considerations in the past (with Excel) and the present (with Ajax and JavaScript), some patterns become apparent (although the actual names could change). But the real kicker is from the comparison between mainframes, CICS and the evolution to microcomputers and Windows to the current state of the Web and it's problems (interoperability between Ajax applications). Very good and thought provoking. It just reminds me of how circular history is: we started with mainframes and dumb terminals, then to client PCs applications (Office, Access, fat clients), then back to big servers and thin clients (with the Web), and with smart clients we are returning the processing power to the client.
The other great post (more of a link to actual MSDN content - Finally some news on PLINQ), reveals the future after .NET 3.5 and MS solutions to the increasing cores with the same speed problem.
The MSDN article shows the primitives for concurrency and how easily concurrency can be "added" to a program. The PTasks article shows it's application to Linq (specially Linq to SQL).
Just checked the MSDN October cover, and it's mainly about concurrency/threads and multiple cores. I'll put it on my short list of "must read"s.
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