I was just catching up on my RSS feeds when I ran across Dana Gardner's latest post, "WOA may soon eclipse SOA as most impactful business transformation agent" which evoked an odd sense of anxiety and the need to immediately jot down some of my SOA thoughts.  In short, Service-Oriented Architecture is a software design principle which attempts to break apart monolithic applications into loosely coupled systems, usually based around business processes.  SOA has been up in our grills for a few years now, and as Gardner suggests the adoption is relatively low for the hype.  I've not checked, but I imagine SOA is in the "trough of disillusionment" on Gartner's hype cycle.  I believe I have some insight into the slow or non-adoption of SOA in the enterprise.

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This morning's keynote entitled "Jurassic Code" by Billy Hollis was a breath of fresh air. The topic of his speech was about simplicity of software design. In making his point, he spoke strongly against Microsoft and the Visual Studio Team. He urged the audience to adopt his manifesto. People don't want features, they want simplicity. He referenced the movement towards simplicity as the "iPod Revolution." I couldn't agree more. As I wrote about yesterday, I'm drowning in a sea of "revolutionary technology." I can't keep up. As someone who manages a software system, a team of developers and many projects as well as analyzes feasibility of new projects, I simply don't have time to learn the ins and outs of every significant or insignificant improvement to our programming models.

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I'm excited and yet depressed about being at the VSLive! conference in Orlando, FL. I like going to conferences. I enjoy the experience of the hotels, the routines and the knowledge sharing. But it's also very depressing and frustrating because it revolves around Microsoft.

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