That developers should focus on business logic and not on plumbing. Let WCF provide the plumbing for you. That is the only fighting chance you have to deal with the complexity of modern applications, the aggressive deadlines and the limited budgets.

Why did you start working with .NET and what has kept you developing on it for so long?

I was invited to a strategic design review of .NET when it was still on the drawing board. The various .NET program managers who taught me .NET, invited me to sit on the design reviews, and I was hooked. I never looked back to C++, where I spent my entire career before .NET. And this was when I was a contributing editor to the C++ Developers Journal, I spoke at the C++ developers conference and I wrote a book in C++, etc. The productivity boost of .NET was too impressive to turn away from.

What's in store for the future of software architecture and more specifically .NET?

We will see at some point a service-oriented language, where the basic construct is not a class, but a service, where every integer is transactional and every string is secure. We are probably a few years away though. We will also see the Workflow Foundation being more mainstream, on-par with C#, and being used by non-professional developers, much like VB was at the time.