This question came up at the blogger dinner. Whenever I talk with some group about applications they always see their technology as the core of their customer's application. You talk to the SQL Server group and everything is about data. You talk with the Web Servicecs team and they see everything as messages. The Windows Client team sees the world revolving around client presentation...

Although there are some applications that are based around a single technology, I believe that most applications use a variety of technologies. I don't think most people will disagree with this, however the discussion last night turned into an interesting discussion about how you can model data access through messaging. Client presentation can also be modeled as messaging - Keith & Don argued (both of who work on the Web Services team).

This brings up another interesting trend that I have seen - everyone thinks they are defining the abstraction layer onto which everything else can be plugged in. OLEDB provided a "data access abstraction" from which you could talk to SQL Server, the file system, or anything else. So when ADO.NET came out it provided a higher layer of abstraction - it could talk to OLEDB and other providers. All you had to do was hook into ADO.NET and everything was grand. You can also see this pattern in almost every API set - everyone wants to be the layer that all developers target, and all the other technology can just plug into it...

Developers want technology that solves their problem - not solves every problem.