Everyone's talking about RIAs now...

It seems to me that the current hot acronym is RIA (Rich Internet Applications). I first read about it on Adobe's website when reading about Adobe Apollo (see my post on this). Now Rick Strahl has published a very good post about the trends we're seeing in the end user application development space. He does a great job putting things like WPF, WPF/E, Adobe Flex/Apollo, HTML/AJAX in perspective. As I said before, something is going on there that every serious developer needs to keep an eye out for...
I like one of the comments to his post (and pretty much mirrors my experiences):

"Another great read Rick. I have to admit that the last two big projects that I was on both were vb6 -> asp.net/ajax conversions and BOTH got halfway through development and were re-architected for clickonce and wpf because ajax still doesn't allow you to throw 30 infragistics web combos on a page. Some presentation layers just don't work well with html and probably never will granted time and a hardware refresh might change that.
When there's a preexisting expectation of the thick client experience, even ajax doesn't cut it. I'd like to see more of this clear separation of layers. The asp.net code behind model doesn't give you the ability to cut with clean lines where ui starts and the last layer stopped. throwing cab and things like ioc into the picture just complicate things. I'm all for the service model. I think Flash is there but they never got it right for the developer. It wasn't until flex builder that they released something with intellisense. Flex is nice but it just adds more overhead and is an abstraction for people who aren't core coders. ..."