This paper reports on the activities and results from the 4th International Workshop on Net-Centric Computing (NCC 2005) that was held on September 25, 2005 in Budapest, Hungary as part of the 13th Software Technology and Engineering Practice conference (STEP 2005). The theme of NCC 2005 was "Middleware: The Next Generation." The workshop focused on issues related to emerging middleware technologies in an NCC environment. Representative topics included gap analysis of current middleware offerings, empirical studies of middleware as an enabling technology for NCC applications, and forecasts for new directions in middleware in the coming years.