It's not necessarily "monkeys", but, disturbingly, Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development.
There are a few exceptions to this rule (think EF Code-First), but that's a drop in the ocean.
If anything MS tools have moved away from clickety-clickery. That was something they were pretty much famous for back in 2008. MVC and EF are just a couple examples of moving away from this patter. This is nothing but imaginative revisionism.
Don't get me wrong, this type of thing drove me from the MS ecosystem a while ago now but they do move largely in the right direction, just too slowly for my tastes.
Agreed - EF code-first, Nuget, and ASP.NET MVC in general are excellent steps in the right direction away from excessively tool-oriented / ultra-bundled / abstracty type things. The very dark days were pure ASP.NET web forms with controls, DataSets, DataTables, ClientScriptBlocks, and the like.
A lot of things in VS are wrappers around very well-documented CLI tools, e.g., svcutil, and I don't begrudge these tools for doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I kind of disagree with this sentiment. From my experience the tooling around editing source files (csharp, razor, javascript, css) has gotten a LOT of love in the past 2 years. You're probably correct in that more work has gone into web development use cases over traditional desktop software, but not much seems to have been added in terms of "visual" programming.
On the designer front I can think of Entity Framework designer and WWF designer, Build Template designer (or however this thing from TFS is called?) and possibly a couple more.
My biggest gripe are all kinds of wizards, most notably "New Project" ones. They do generate a lot of cruft I have to clean up later and pull way too many dependencies.
AFAIK, Visual Basic was targeted at non-professional/beginner programmers, so having wizards and designers is fine there.
My main gripe with abundance of today's "visual programming" is that we have memory-managed languages with immense expressive power and ability to write all kinds of DSLs, yet what Microsoft does is it provides crippled XML-backed designers along with half-baked frameworks and class libraries.
Microsoft has always had "half-baked frameworks and class libraries".
I actually like MFC, but it never really got past the "good for a first cut" phase, IMO. Fortunately, I've never had to deal with .NET, and besides a little MFC, most of my work is on Linux these days.
Ya, I can't begin to tell you the number of times I have been made fun of by ___ text editor fanatics for using an IDE that has wizard clicky things/drag drop components etc
The powershell prompt to manage your nuget package dependencies on a project is pretty much the opposite of 'clickety' development. The F# interactive prompt, likewise.
MS have always done a good job of catering to a wide range of developer personas.
Enterprise developer here. That wizard bullshit is 100% enterprise. It's horrible to use and only exists because most enterprisey programmers are too terrible to grasp more productive coding methods.
Still 100x better than digging through 100 pages of abstruse Java docs about AbstractProxyBeanDAOFactoryProxy.GenerateAbstractProxyBeanDAOFactoryAccessor though.
It's weird, because my experience of .NET enterprise development recently has been of people with Java-envy needlessly using Unity, and every other enterprisey framework they can get their hands on, for even small projects.
I felt that way when I switched from m.exe + cl.exe to Visual C++ but I eventually got over it. There's actually some pretty cool stuff happening at the lower levels, check out the "Going Native" stuff on Channel 9.
It's not necessarily "monkeys", but, disturbingly, Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development.
The term "wizard" came about because of the AppWizard and ClassWizard features in Visual C++.
Clickety-clickety has been a goal of Visual Studio since before it was Visual Studio.
Really? How exactly does VS2012 pander to "web monkeys" at the expense of others?