Watch out for these projects

Microsoft had a habit in the mid-2000s of releasing Community Technology Previews in clusters—enough new projects at once that you could spend a week just evaluating what was worth your attention. In June 2007, four arrived roughly simultaneously, each touching a different part of the application lifecycle.

Project Atoria was a deployment and provisioning tool, aimed at simplifying how .NET applications were packaged and distributed. At a time when ClickOnce was the state of the art and MSI authoring was a discipline unto itself, anything that reduced deployment friction was worth watching.

Project Acropolis was a more ambitious target: a framework for building composite WPF applications using navigation and module composition patterns. It was, in retrospect, an early attempt at what would eventually become Prism. The ideas were sound; the implementation was CTP-rough.

Project Jasper addressed infrastructure management, focusing on how Windows Server environments could be configured and monitored through a more programmatic, policy-driven model.

Project GlidePath was accessible via projectglidepath.net and focused on process guidance—helping teams navigate the software development lifecycle with contextual, just-in-time advice rather than upfront documentation.

None of these shipped as described. Atoria’s ideas fed into later deployment tooling. Acropolis became Prism. GlidePath quietly faded. But that’s the nature of CTP-stage exploration: Microsoft was testing which directions the ecosystem would follow.

The broader point was, and remains, that watching what the platform vendor is experimenting with is a useful signal. CTPs and previews show you where the industrial incentives are pointing—what problems are being treated as worth solving at the framework level. You don’t have to adopt any of it. But knowing it exists gives you a longer horizon than the sprint board alone provides.