Great advances have been made in Integrated Development Environments over the past three years. These IDE’s aim to simplify every day development tasks – everything from compiling code to handling check in procedures with a version control provider to providing drag and drop design interfaces. I am constantly amazed at the advances made in Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2003 and they bested themselves once again with the 2005 version. Eclipse for java based development has come a long way since the first time I looked at it.

I’m lazy. Any advantage an IDE has to offer me, I’ll try and oblige them the opportunity. At my last company I did an experiment with our service oriented architecture to utilize the IDE to do most of the wiring for me from the data access to the visual representation by working with typed datasets returned from web services and presenting them via data grids. This was excellent as the IDE was able to save me many lines of code. Based on that success, I’ve tried to let IDE’s do things for me that I could normally do on my own. The attractive part of this type of functionality is that it saves you time and handles the plumbing portion for you.

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