What would it take for your organization to move to all the latest-and-greatest Microsoft tools - Visual Studio 2005, Team System, etc.? This is a question that I have been more interested in since my move from being principal consultant at Magenic Technologies, a premier provider of Microsoft platform software-development consulting, to associate director of Information Technology at Bear Stearns, a leading global investment banking, securities trading, and brokerage firm.

At Magenic - and the company I worked at prior to Magenic, Expand Beyond - the choice of technology for any given task was always a no-brainer: whatever the newest, best technology Microsoft offered for a task was always what got used. This was a nice aspect of working for a Microsoft partner, in the eyes of a Microsoft fanatic like me.

Now that I'm working in the big, corporate world, I've encountered - for the first time - the phenomenon of "existing corporate standards," which are not necessarily 100 percent Microsoft. Whereas I used to think that getting folks to adopt technologies like Team System was just a matter of getting developers to want them, I now understand how very, very hard such adoptions can be. When you've got one platform that encompasses half a dozen different tools, what are the odds that any big organization won't already have different tools adopted for each of these tasks?

A factor that I'd come to notice at my last client before my change of employers, but which I'd never really considered before, was the fear of bugs in really new technologies. Back in my "start up" days, we'd think nothing of building on Beta - or, in some cases, even Alpha - builds of the latest technologies. It seems like the big corporate world doesn't have much of a taste for this kind of adventure, either.

Therefore, in the face of all of this, what I want to know from you folks is: How are you planning on moving to the latest generation of Microsoft tools? To take it a step further, have any of you managed to get any projects going using the next generation of technologies - WinFX, Windows Workflow, etc? If you have, I'd like to know your secrets to success!

Maybe you work for a Microsoft Partner, where you don't have alternative technologies competing for your attention. Maybe you work for companies small enough to not have lengthy technology approval decisions. Whatever the case - how are you managing to be on the cutting edge of .NET? Enquiring minds want to know!

We have pieces on a few of these new technologies in this issue - for those of you who want to know what you might be missing! On Team System, we have Su Llewellyn's piece on Spec Explorer. For VSTO, Eric Carter has brought us a piece on server-side document development (a hot topic indeed, for anyone who has ever tried this using VSTO 2003!). Finally, there is Israel Hilerio's piece on Windows Workflow Foundation - a truly cutting-edge piece of technology, only recently unveiled at Microsoft's PDC conference 2005.