The author makes good points. One of the things that has always disturbed me about MS widgets is this naive opinion that it's good to provide tools to provide the "common man/woman" access to critical enterprise data or processes. I think I've told the story before about being in the MS Conference Center for some demo where a secretary(!!!) could use some widget and dick with enterprise data. Ken, Alan, and other Fox Team members were there and we all kinda looked at each other and came to the conclusion that this was not a good idea. Probably because we all had extensive realworld experience.

MS just seems to be heading in the wrong direction in this regard. They seem to think that piling layers of "auto-magic" on top of the complexity of the Framework is the solution. IMHO auto-magic is something deeply worrisome to a good developer. We want to see the gears. We need tools to enhance the discoverability of the Framework; tools to enhance productivity through better discoverability. I can't count the number of times I've had to refactor code because some other binary provided funtionality that cut the complexity of my code in half but I simply didn't know about it.

I've pointed this out to old friends still at MS repeatedly until I'm blue in the face. But the Borg Collective seems unwilling or unable to grasp this point. Was I that obtuse when on the Fox Team?

Sigh.

>>> Microsoft's Dave Medlin says, "“This hearkens back to Visual FoxPro, where you could develop and test at the same time.”
>
>Develop and test at the same time? Imagine that.
>
>Despite the reference to VFP, not everybody is impressed. http://blog.prosysplus.com/2010/08/lightswitch-or-bait-and-switch.html