To that I would add 1) various database glue allowing drag-n-drop bindings, 2) Incredibly good MS Office integration (or anything COM), and 3) Huge library of third-party components

(I haven't kept up with .NET desktop development, but in the 1.1-era, MS Office stuff was painful.)

They fixed all the pain in .Net 4.0. Summary:

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/42590

What is the web app equivalent of this? There must be several different companies trying to create a drag and drop web application IDE

The closest web app analog is (was) ASP.NET WebForms, which has pretty much been replaced by ASP.NET MVC.

WebForms wishes it was VB6, but sadly, the ViewState abstraction leaks complexity like a sieve for any but the most trivial case.

I agree wholeheartedly. Almost all of the abstractions in WebForms are leaky, and the think that it's abstracting... HTML, isn't so complex that it benefits from being abstracted.

It was a learning process for all of us :)

http://apex.oracle.com/ is the closest.

When I explain ApEx I usually describe it as "Access, for Oracle, but with web pages".

And like Access or VB6 it's great while you colour inside the lines. You can use it to smash together small LOB CRUB apps together in hours, even minutes for the smallest ones.

The good thing about Apex is people can provision their own workspaces whwnever they want, but still get the central IT support for backups etc.

Yes, that's definitely an advantage too.

Wavemaker is doing a decent job, but it's probably closer to MS Access for the web with the ability to go deeper using Java.

Sencha architect is trying to do some of the same things as well.

You can take a look at RealStudio. The Web Edition is in the early versions and is still a little rough around the edges though their Mac/Windows desktop development environments are much better and have been around for many years.

Link: http://www.realsoftware.com

It's still that easy with .Net and Visual Studio :)

XAML or WinForms still rock.

It wasn't always that easy. Integrating Office apps prior to the introduction of VSTO was ugly and fraught with incompatible types. Especially if you were using a language other than VB.NET, which generally meant a whole lot of Type.Missing argument entries in every other line of code in addition to creating marginally machine-to-machine compatible COM interop wrappers. Getting beyond the "Works on My Machine" certification wasn't always an easy thing in VS 2003/Framework 1.x.

I never had much of a problem to be honest and I built some behemoths which involved ASP.Net, .Net CF, remoting and all sorts of other junk in the same app.

There are a lot of not-programmers who thrived doing just this, and some of them are still around, getting programming jobs based off of that experience that doesn't translate at all to modern frameworks.