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.

Hollis made his point by referencing two very useful but widely unknown features of Visual Studio 2005. One feature was a context menu that resets a property to its default value and the other was an incremental search in the editor. Only a handful of developers were aware of the features. So how, or why were those features developed? Who was asking for those features? And couldn't they spend the time to develop those features by improving our programming experience with tools that actually help us?

I've made my preference for Apple and the Mac OS X known. I believe every Windows developer could learn a thing or two from Apple. Apple designs simple and elegant software, spending their time on the features that provide value to real people that use their products as opposed to the small minority who want to use insane easter egg-like keystrokes and gestures.

Back to the keynote... Hollis predicted a major paradigm shift from imperative programming models to declarative programming models. He referenced the architect of C# (and Borland's Delphi which revolutionized RAD development), in which he said at a previous conference that the imperative programming model is at its end. We've taken it as far as it can go. While I'm not so sure I agree with that statement, it's clear to me that we're quickly approaching a point in time where everything we know as software developers is going to change.

I consider myself a fairly smart guy and anytime I get anxious about something it's because I feel I'm not understanding it completely. I'm getting to that point with the entire .NET framework. Quite simply, it's too much for one human to possibly know.

So after the keynote I walked up to Billy, shook his hand and told him thank you for making me feel sane again. I'm not alone in thinking that this whole .NET thing is a kludge. Don't get me wrong, there are some great things about .NET. A lot of great things. But there's a lot broken with it too and its inherent in the model.