I've been wanting to post something of this nature, but I guess my literary skills aren't quite as well honed as the author of the Ride Out the .NET Programming Revolution article on FTPOnline. It sums up some of what I'd been thinking about .net and programming in general.
In addition to the enhancements and paradigm shifts found in WPF, WCF and LINQ, I can't help wondering whether the simpler more mundane tasks programmers face everyday will ever be "attended to".
Examples of this include validation of variable and parameter values, the data access paradigm (which hasn't really changed at all) and even perhaps built in support for the model-view-controller pattern in windows forms and web pages, better collection classes with set type operations... I could go on...
An example of variable validation can be found in the Ada language when declaring an integer.
weekDay: INTEGER range 1..7
Here the semantics of the variable are expressed and the necessary run-time checks are "magically" done to ensure only valid values within the range of 1 and 7 can be assigned.
I don't think any of the examples are really revolutionary and perhaps that's the problem. Perhaps some of the examples are too high level or 4GL'ish and thus are not considered for .net languages.
Food for thought...
According to the Doolwind's Game Coding Site my programmer personality type is:
DHSC
You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most
important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better.
After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs
in the same way.
You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you
know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.
You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You
write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.