Ilya Ryzhenkov, a .NET Tools Product Manager at JetBrains, relays some of his thoughts on the var keyword here.

If you had a chance to use some of the latest c# language features you have no doubt heard of var.  Coming from the idea of KISS, keep it simple stupid, I not only agree with Ilya, but would say that this is the way it should have always been.  Especially now that we are in the day of IDE's and IDE addon's like JetBrain's resharper we should be reducing the amount of code we need to maintain and making the syntax easier to read.