@peleon:
I'm sure that IA64 will not become the future of coding. Itanium processors have been available for a long time now and didn't catch much attention. They are very expensive and have only limited use.

The fact that Intel offers C++ cross-compilers for IA64 doesn't tell much about the Itanium future. Intel is also offering FORTRAN compilers since many years and nobody notices it because of the limited usability.

x64 programming will come for sure since it can be added to most modern high level programming languages without much trouble and can be enabled by the programmers with just one compiler switch.

I hope .NET will not be the future of programming. It is simply not portable. Making code run only with interpreters or within virtual machines makes it thousands of times slower than it could be. This is acceptable for languages like Java, PHP or Python since they are very portable and only used for smaller projects. All .NET crap runs only on Windows and there are no plans from Microsoft to port the framework to any other OS.

This is why .NET is completely useless and will hopefully die very soon (but the release of VS2005 reduced my hopes already). Only people "programming" with their mouse instead of their keyboard could think different.

Some "other crap" will also come in future, but it will not get big influence. It might be used to make analysis of some protections harder or to write applications for mobile telephones or refrigerators. There is really nothing you could especially learn now to be prepared for it when it comes in future.

So if you already know x32, learning x64 and always using common sense will give you some more years of reversing without having to worry much about future technologies.