OSNews

It is not the language, it is the environment. You open a new project, connect to a database, and drag the tables you want to work with on to a design service. You now have a moderately good datalayer. You make a new form, and drag some fields and wire them up to the data source. You now have a create/update/read/delete screen without writing any code, and having spent 5-10 minutes.

Not saying code generation will take you all the way there for anything but the most simple of apps, but as i said, most of these apps are pretty damn simple. When depoyment time rolls around, you set up a clickonce site up in IIS, and publish to it. The users go to the site over the intranet, one click and it is on the machine. At every launch of the app, it will check itself against the server and update any bits that are different.

Now, VB blows, and people who do that kind of work are barely programmers (anyone with any sort of drive and ability would want something more to sink their teeth into), but these kind of drones come very cheap, and are able to bang out lots of "good enough" applications very quickly.

Complex apps are another story, and the situation is not as cut and dried. But for simple things nothing else I have tried or read about comes close.