Charles Petzold is no novice programmer.  Nor is he one of those developers who never actually writes useful code.  He's a published windows forms development author who knows the technologies and from whence they derived...

This article entertains the idea that the wonderful things that visual studio does for us makes us less capable programmers. 

interesting...

I think, although I could be wrong, that this article was half satirical.

In complaining about the behavior of visual studio and what it forces a developer to do, he pointed out what sorts of things it does for us: validates spelling and references, stubs out boilerplate, repetative code, provides inspection into available libraries and associated documentation, etc.  I'm just scratching the surface. 

Whose got vs 2005?  Holy crap!  Refactor - nice!  Generate tests.  wow!  Class diagram - YES! 

I've written several utilities to do primitive things that I did over, and over, and over, ad naseum...    For example, when authoring entity classes, I always create private or protected member variables to hold state and public accessors to provide an external interface.  I have gotten in the habit of using the public property from internal methods except, occassionally, in the constructor.  Early on, I usually don't have much logic to include in the property.  Later on, however, I often find I need to set a dirty flag or include some other logic in the setting of a property.  Therefore, everytime I expose a field as public, even for simple entities, I  eventually have to replace the public field with a property and update any references and spend a non-trivial amount of time refactoring the access to that field.  So I wrote a utility that parses my c# file.  It finds all public fields using a regex and replaces the variable name with a PASCAL cased, protected field, prefixed with an underscore.  It then creates a public property of the same type having the fileds former name, and maps the property value to the new protected variable.  Now I can create my classes with public fields where I want properties and private or protected where I don't.  When I am satisfied with the structure, I execute said utility and, viola, I have what I prefer for my class file.  It saves me a significant amount of time when developing large sets of classes. Visual Studio 2005 "re-factor - encapsulate field" - freakin' outstanding. 

So I don't really think visual studio makes me less of a developer.  I can, and have, done much of what it does for me.  If I had to develop in notepad and compile with csc.exe, it would be a slow but successful endeavor.

I do, however, understand his point.

If I am on a machine without visual studio or an internet connection and someone asked me to write a windows forms appliication that says, "hello world" with nothing but the command line c sharp compiler, or, even more challenging, java, it would take me all day. The speed of my development would be directly proportional to the speed of my internet connection.  No internet connection?  It'd be like sawing through a redwood with a butter knife.  It is physically possible...  If I had to do that often, I'd go to the book store, get a good reference book, and eventually, I'd be very proficient.  I'd wow and amazed people with my notepad skills and they'd say, "he must really know what he's doing because he doesn't use intellisense."  They'd scratch their heads when it wouldn't compile because it would be unfamiliar and foreign and the feedback wouldn't be there.  When it did compile and run they'd wonder how I learned how to do all that really deep, low level stuff.  I'd be a super-guru.  I'd be the notepad man.  When I first learned how to program, I didn't have a computer.  That didn't go so well. I had a C++ book and a macintosh at work that I'd try to experimnet on about once a week.  Then I got fired from that job and I had nothing but the book.  So I'd do the exercises on notepaper and manually work through the logic.  One quarter through the book, about the time I hit the #include definitions and advanced libraries, the notepaper  approach broke down.  I really needed notepad.   So I enrolled in a programming class gauranteed to get me head first into the programming industry.  I studied my ass off and stayed late into the night using the school's computers.  I went straight from notepaper  to Visual Basic IDE and SQL 7.0 enterprise manager.  I learned to develop databases diagram first.  I LOVE visual studio and all it does for me.  I don't even mind the things it makes me do, although I probably don't even know what those things might be. Sometimes I think I want to learn Ruby or Lisp.  I usually get as far as opening notepad and reading an article but then I desperately miss VS. Most of all, I get an idea and think, "I could do this in five minutes in Visual Studio" and I'm back on the crack. 

So, no, I don't believe Visual Studio rots the mind.  I think it enables the mind to produce efficiently.  I have yet to cross something that I cannot  do in Visual Studi using C#.  The really slick things usually end up as part of the next Visual Studio or framework release.  Evolution will eventually make the being unaware of the individual parts.  I don't know how to make my stomach digest food.  Why would I learn all about that when I can just eat?  ..and it happens.  I can focus on making tasty creations.  If something goes wrong, I have a doctor in the family, actually, a few of them.  I'd rather focus on writing and designing useful applications of software, not the low level details of the software language...  Its all virtual anyway!  It all boils down to IL.  Should I learn IL?  hell no...  Use the tools.  Use the.  Swallow the pill.  Drink the Koolaid.