Code but no coding

I attended the CMAP meeting tonight and heard a presentation on MVC 3 from Microsoft. MVC 3 is a web development thing, allowing you to build web applications. it takes advantage of .NET, HTML 5, jQuery, and a few Microsoft-specific packages. Using the packages and tools, one can assemble a slick web application quickly.

The presenter walked us through the development a calendar application. It took all of about 90 minutes.

My impression: easy to use, lots of code, but very little coding. There was code on the screen (C# and HTML) but not much in the way of creating code. The wizards did a lot of the work, and the work was mostly connecting existing pieces, not writing functions, methods, or classes.

Is this the future of coding? I guess it is, in Microsoft's view. This is coding so simple that anyone can do it -- as long as the understand the components that are available. Sixty years ago, coding was in assembly language and you had to know the processor architecture and the operating system calls. Forty years ago, coding was in a high-level language and you had to know the language and its (rather limited) library. Now you have to know the language syntax and a large collection of library classes and their methods, and most of the effort is for the libraries.