I recently attended the Calgary Code Camp and had a few insights into the future of our world.

I feel that the need to specialize is comming. As much as I hate specialization as it can make you obsolete pretty quickly (i.e. foxpro specialists are few and far between). I know asp, vb, c#, javascript, sql2000, reporting services, crystal, access, php, networking, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I find that I use a lot of these skills on a regular basis but it is harder and harder to keep up to speed. I feel that I don't know enough about programming even though that is what I do all day. Technology has reached the speed that my legs can not keep up to. I feel that having to narrow your skillset is the only way to be an effective programmer and still have a life.

At the camp I saw a presentation of the Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF). WPF is cool in that it allows you to write an interface using an xml markup language and has a seperation of ui and code behind like the web does. You can also do flash like animations with a timeline and render 3D objects. While this has a big wow factor I feel that it will not be used that much. For one we are always under a time crunch as developers and making a pretty animated interface is not high on our priorities. Business users want a fast application that they are not sitting there watching the pretty animations that loads data. Sure at first it is cool but the novelty wears off pretty quick. The xml scripting language is a pain as now I have to learn another language to design the UI and it seems that the naming is different than html / css naming too so I am going to have to learn to use back-color instead of backgroundcolor or something like that. Overall I think that we will see some nice looking apps but wont have time to build them ourselves.

I like Christies comment of needing a pause button for life.