Will 5.x be .NET or C/SIDE? It's hard to tell exactly what Microsoft is going to do with 5.0/5.1. Version 5.0 will definitely be a C/SIDE interface.
Last year (2005) at Directions, they announced that the development tool would be exclusively .NET, with extensions to handle the accounting-specific stuff. This year they announced that they have moved away from that.
The description they provided for the 5.1 release basically indicated that there would be a 3 tier structure. Tier 1 would be SQL (required for version 5.1, the NAV native database will go away in that release). Tier 2 would be the business logic, which would still primarily be in C/SIDE. There would be translators to move things like forms to C#, where they would be compiled. There were a good number of questions from VARs about what the ratio of .Net to C/SIDE development would be. Many were concerned that C/SIDE seems to require different skills from .NET. Also, questions were concerned with ease of modification, particularly for simple mods like adding fields.
In 5.1, the whole thing will sit inside SharePoint Services.
Overall, the strategy for 5.1 seems to be to preserve much of the core logic in C/SIDE, while allowing a migration of the UI to C# and .NET. I think that's an excellent plan, from the technical side. Likely to produce a product that looks good and is stable quickly after release.
The issue (which came to mind several times) was what this would do to migration for clients that have extensive customization. To the questions above, the most common Microsoft answer was, "Too early to know for sure."
It says something that exactly ONE technical (programmer) person was allow to leave Denmark for the conference. All the rest had their little (maybe big. What do I know?) noses to the grindstone working out the final bugs in 5.x for March 2007 release.
Demos of 5.0 looked basically like 4.0 in UI. 5.1 is "role based," and the only "role" they showed was "salesperson" or "order entry person." The 5.1 demos were clunky and looked cobbled together to show us the look and feel. We are supposed to see pre-release 5.1 stuff with the 5.0 release in March, and I think we'll know more then about how close MS is to having something. I don't expect to see the migration toolkit or any hint of what's really coming in that before the actual launch, and think there will need to be significant planning before any migrations to 5.1 occur. To my eye, there are still some rough spots in 4.0 (for example, the report margin problem in SP2, quickly fixed by the .EXE in SP3.)
All in all, however, 5.1 looks good from a user experience standpoint. It clusters the most common tools for a task on a single pane, and allows for development in .NET, C#, etc. I'm actually looking forward to it, but we have significant .NET development experience, not just C/SIDE. I can see how it would frighten a shop that had only C/SIDE experience.
