[mikewarot]

We used to have tools that could be used to build a CRUD application from scratch in a few hours (minutes for a trivial one). Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were widely used by domain experts to hammer out a workable tool.

Then Microsoft got obsessed with .NET because they thought everyone was going to bail on the X86, and used it as an excuse to kill off VB6. The shift to "professional" programming tools really just added a ton of boilerplate.

Since then, we've been forced to send UI though a soda straw to a random web browser, and make it all work.

[amerkhalid]

Microsoft Access was great for this. You could built a quick app in couple of hours and deploy in local network with a shared database.