Time flies, and when you are working on a technology magazine it flies even faster. I find it amazing that we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of CODE Magazine. In addition to my life slinging CODE and thinking about what sorts of articles might interest readers like you and me, I'm a big fan of the geeky movies that people expect geeks like me to enjoy. For this editorial, I'd like to take a look back at what technologies and movies I've been paying attention to in the last 10 years.

Set the clock back to spring 2000, just a few months after the Y2K global rewrite. COM is king. Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic are the premier development platforms for PC-based business applications. SQL Server 7 made what once difficult, simple. And CODE Magazine was born.

2000

  • X-Men and Gladiator are the geek movies of the year.
  • Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro and Microsoft Access are primary development tools
  • CODE ran articles about: DNA, COM+, XML, XSLT and IE5

2001

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the geek movie of the year.
  • Visual Studio .NET beta in full force.
  • CODE ran articles about: Visual C#, IIS, SOAP, Web services, Microsoft Passport, and ASP.NET

2002

  • Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers are the geek movies of the year
  • Visual Studio .NET released. Visual C#, Visual J# and Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework make their debut.
  • CODE ran articles about: SQL Server, Cryptography, My Services (doh!) and .NET languages
  • Rod Paddock becomes Editor-in-Chief of CODE Magazine

2003

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and The Matrix Revolutions are the geek movies of the year.
  • Visual Studio .NET 2003 released with C++ support in the IDE and .NET Framework 1.1
  • CODE ran articles about: Visual C++, JavaScript, DHTML, Visual FoxPro 8, GDI+ and Tablet development

2004

  • Spider-Man 2 is the geek film of the year
  • Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) and Yukon (SQL Server 2005) in beta.
  • CODE ran articles about: WSE, Generics, Google Web Services, SQL Server 2005, DNN, Visual FoxPro 9, and unit testing

2005

  • Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and Batman Begins are the geek films of the year.
  • Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 ship
  • CODE ran articles about: SQL Server 2005, Crystal Reports, Indigo (WCF), and LINQ

2006

  • X-Men: the Last Stand and Casino Royale are the geek movies of the year.
  • CODE ran articles about: WCF, .NET Remoting, Domain Specific Languages, Click Once, RFID and Windows Mobile

2007

  • Transformers and 300 are the geek movies of the year.
  • Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 are in beta.
  • CODE ran articles about: Agile development, SharePoint, Tablet PC development, BizTalk, ASP.NET, Silverlight

2008

  • Iron Man and The Dark Knight are the geek movies of the year.
  • Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.0 ship
  • CODE ran articles about: SharePoint, Entity Framework, C# 3.0, OLAP, MDX, WPF, Windows Live, F#

2009

  • Avatar and The Hangover are the geek films of 2009
  • Visual Studio 2010 in beta
  • CODE ran articles about: Accessibility, IE 8, jQuery, Virtual Earth, Twitter, nHibertate, and Open Source

2010

  • Iron Man 2 and Kick-Ass are the geek films of the year (so far).
  • Visual Studio 2010 ships
  • CODE Magazine is talking about what software and techniques are interesting and relevant to software developers in 2010 and beyond! We will still have a focus on .NET technologies but will throw in other non-Microsoft technologies to keep us looking outside the box.

As you can see from the timeline above, we have seen a radical shift in technologies and techniques we use to develop software. In 2000 we were developing software for desktop PCs using Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic. Fast forward to 2010 where we are using managed CODE to build applications for desktops, the Web, XBOX game consoles and in the very near future we will have Silverlight on smart phones. It's been a fun 10 years and I cannot wait to see where we end up in the next 10.