Built for programmers and, rather importantly for me, some fairly technically savey managers, directors, shareholders etc this site offers the free independent advice of an international internet and Web developer.
I see the timepath to becomming expert lengthening, counter-intuitive some might think given all the RAD tools.
Take this site for example, as simlpe as you can get, just two tables, master and details, thats all there is to it. However, the temptation to use RAD tools to construct it shortcuts the steps and knowledge needed to be able to build desirable architectures, to undertand thing in greater detail.
Having said that the series of short video's on ASP.NET 2.0's features are astounding in that they show RAD Web application development to be at the same level that RAD desktop application was when the Web was invented.
It's hard to say how Web Applications built with such tools will perform with heavy usage (see below) but without diving into such areas it is fair to say can do a good job for small scale complex problem solving and would perform well with loads produced by many hundreds concurrent users.
"Web Application performance and load testing options
The point of this article is to draw attention to developers of the importance of being able to build such "simple" systems without RAD tools.
More importantly to draw the attention of I.T. managers directors et al to the lack of expereince of everyone at this stage of maintaining and extending such systems using the RAD toolsets used to build them.
I heard that one of the main reasons the partial class were incorporated into .NET 2.0 was following requests from control developers. In 2003 and changes a developer made by hand to a code (auto) generated class would be over written and lost if the class was re-generated.
So partial classes get round this problem and protect and preserve and hand made improvements made to a autogenerated sections.
The bottom line is I would'nt want to have to rely on this particular mechanism for tunning, extending and adapting a RAD built system too much beyound it's orginal specification without saying hey this system was'nt designed to be used this way, lets re-examine the underlying architecture.