Jeff Putz asks “What happend to the Whidbey hype?”. It’s a great question and a few people have already commented on the post with their thoughts, but I figured I’d chime in with my thoughts here.
I think the biggest reason things have died down is that back then the features were new to the runtime or our favorite language so everyone was excited about learning about how they work. Usually those of us geeky enough to even be interested in hype like this grok how things work relatively quickly. So we’ve gotten past the “ooohs and ahhhs” stage where someone posts a snippet that shows how to use do something cool with something like generics or an anonymous delegate in C#. Now it’s back to “How can I actually use these features to solve real world problems?” and, as usual, that’s a lot harder to come up with articles for.
For me the Whidbey hype is now mainly about the IDE. I am dying to use it in my every day work. I actually need Visual Studio features, especially Team System, more than I need any of the new C# language features right now.