Onion Approach to development
Via pdcbloggers.net I came across this interesting blog entry in Ole Eichhorn's blog He says that the success of a new technology is inversely related to the difficultly of learning and understanding the technology. In other words the simpler something is to grasp and learn the more likely it is to succeed. He relates this hypothesis directly to Microsoft Technologies saying that the more complex that .Net becomes the less likely it will succeed. A fear that he relates directly to look at the PDC session abstracts. In fact he states that problem that if you ask different people you get different definitions of .Net illustrates his point.
I have to say there is some logic in his arguments, a good example is PHP. It is perceived to be easy as it looks at first glance to be simply server side Javascript. But it has become incredibly successful with a lot of sites using PHP and large community of PHP developers sharing code. However, look at the comments on the following thread on Slashdot you will see that some "real" developers don't like PHP as you cannot build complex systems with PHP in the same way as you can with J2EE or .Net.
The problem I think is that in many ways what people really want is an "onion approach" to development. Very simple to start off with but one that provides immediate response and uses a simple syntax. However, one that grows with you, so that each time you remove another skin of the onion the complexity may increase but so does your flexibility.
VB.NET is meant to be the successor of VB but I feel, and I expressed this to the VB Project Management team at the Orlando PDC, it is too complex and looks too foreign to your average VB programmer. Really what is required is a simple .Net language that hides all the OOP stuff and is task driven.
As for the PDC, I hope that you do not need a masters in computer science just to understand the keynotes.