I just wrote a small .NET application to display some database queries and I didn’t write one bit of code while doing it. I’m wondering how far we are from the “code behind” being hidden from the developer. Of course my little app didn’t do much so I was able to “avoid” having to jump into the back-end, but there seems to be a real movement toward developing applications using the WYSIWYG method rather than the old “notepad” method. ESRI demoed quite a bit of the .NET ADF where no code was written, but the results were as good as anything our little shop has created. It seems ever few years developers begin to wonder if they are working themselves out of a job, but I guess something new always comes along that requires us to dive into the code behind.
Of course I can always jump into Baseball Hacks and remember what using BBEdit (yea I do love BBEdit) is all about.