Five years and one day ago I wrote my first blogpost. Blogging has done more to and for me than I could ever imagine so this celebration is worth a little rant on a subject which has changed most over these years.

Five years ago I was still with one foot in the Delphi world. Delphi was at the time where the terms RAD and wizard were considered qualities of great value. These days saying these words alone is enough to light the flames. What has changed ? The essential part is imho that In Delphi the RAD designers and wizards were two way tools. You launch the wizard or drop something on a design surface and it will guide you to produce source code. You modify the source code and the wizard or the designer will pick up these changes in the next rounds. So it is you and the wizard working on a shared piece of code. Of course you can do horrible things with such tools, like dropping a sqlconnection directly on a form and all that. But you don't need wizardry to do that, the devil is in the developer himself.

Arriving in the MS world I found wizards from a quite different guild. They didn't tell me what they were going to do, hid the result in invisible code and did not allow another round. The most hilarious one was "create compatible Guid" in (pre .net)  VB. It took me some time to realize that after every rebuild I of the COM server I had to re-import the typelibrary in the consuming (Delphi) application. Quite recently I encountered a comparable sorcerer when moving some machines to another domain. Trying to do this job as fast as possible I used the Windows migrate settings wizard. Which did work for a lot of things. But it never told me what it had actually migrated, and now once in a while somebody asks me "wtf happened to xxx?". Always surprising. The wizard did produce some messages but these were of the abracadabra kind, only comprehensible to members of the same guild.

So looking back it is the end of the era of magic. (For those who only recognize starwars quotes, that is from my favorite cult series) Wizards are dead but in the next five years I would love to see the return of the coaches. Thank goodness all it takes to see some of that is refactoring with Resharper. And in VS 2008 the split view designing an aspx page is a RADical improvement.