Products vs. Developers? Products!
We can see all over us new RAD Tools that will make the IT managers exciting about the fact that budget will shrink for the new planned projects.
Today we have available platforms of any kind: Portals, KM, EAI, Search and so on.
We also have a rich frameworks like .NET that make our work productive - lots of out of the box classes we can use make our work easier then ever. We can use enhance IDE to eliminate repetitive lines of code. We can easily use re-factoring automatic tools for making our code more efficient and stand with standards.
The GUI does not stay behind. We have huge set of ready to use winforms controls and web controls. Even a simple web control like Site Map or Login is given to us.
ASP.NET v2 will bring us Master/Page control that will enable us to re-use our visualization. We will get Themes manager to easily manage the look & feel of our web applications.
We have lots of tools that help us to construct SOA applications. Start from WSDL, XSD editors and other enhance wizards.
The core and infrastructure services like Roles management, Access to DBs, O/R (e.g ObjectSpaces), Profile and Personalization, Compressions and so on are all part of the framework. Its not recommended to build your own implementations for these kind of core building blocks.
If still, something is missing u can check the Enterprise Library - the new version of Microsoft Application Blocks.
In order to control such a wide range of tools, technologies and ready to use services architects are going to get a new toy called WhiteHorse, that will assist them to assist their developers to get the right decisions when development phase is started.
WhiteHorse modeling tool will enable architects to design a distributed applications in a drag & drop fashion(drag your facade layer, service interface, workflow, business logic etc).
It enables architects to deliver a physical view for developers regards the application and the way it will look like and structured. WhiteHorse, with the generate code capabilities will be much more the a logic view of the application. Its also enable to add to the generated code validation rules and constraints that developers should follow. WhiteHorse will also keep the design updated and synch with the generated code after developers started their coding.
This will help architect to re-view the work.
The design model copy is not static anymore.
Microsoft see WhiteHorse as part of DSI Vision which is - Dynamic Systems Initiative which means - coding is out - tools are in.
By using XML, XSD we can describe everything - this is its strength. We can describe Web Services, GUI, Validations, DBs, OO Classes. We can see it within the Office System everywhere - use for describing our documents, document logic and so on.
This is why we can see XML emerge to every code generator.
Lots of developers will become tools implementers who are working around products like BizTalk, Portal platforms and so on. You do need to see the wide picture and connect lots of black boxes to one or more workflows or processes.
I can imagine, people talking ten years from now how much time and code a developers spend in order to do simple tasks like - connecting to legacies, managing the corporate portal or integrate the organization different legacies systems.
Actually - this is happening right now.
Conclusion - Code and coder will be here for a while. But still their number will dramatically be fall especially in IT industry.