So, it just hasn't come up in the past few years. I've written tons of web services, but it's been several years since I've written a web app. I have to write a little internal site at work so, rather than re-invent the wheel, I took a look at the latest iteration of Microsoft's Entity Framework for ASP.net.
I have to say, if I was a 25-year-old web programmer, I might be a bit concerned that they've made it this easy to get something up and running. The functionality would have to be fairly complicated before any real programming skills were called into play. It makes you wonder how long web programming will be a viable profession. As I'm a 52-year-old Data Architect who doesn't really want to blow a week writing a silly little dashboard showing the status of our reporting cubes, I was pretty happy about how effortless it was.
I'm sure the anti-MS crowd has equally compelling tools. I'm not a zealot; if I can get it done without installing 10 new open-source tools on my PC, I'm great with it. Even the stuff I am good at, generating the schema for the underlying performance data in SQL Server, was handled pretty much automatically and the results were about as good as I would have done by hand.
I'm not seriously suggesting that solid technical skills are becoming worthless. Actually, quite the opposite. So much of the fluffy stuff is now handled for you that the only reason to involve a programmer is to deal with the really hard stuff. If you're not up to that, well, you might want to find another line of work.
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