Has it ever been easier? Is there some hidden nostalgia for a world I'm not a part of that made application development dramatically simpler? Writing code is hard, no matter what the environment, one of Java's largest failures was 'write once, read anywhere'. Look at Joel's experience with .NET: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PleaseLinker.html. This article is just shrill yelling of 'square peg! round hole!' and apparently it works.

> Has it ever been easier?

Yes. I remember many years ago I wrote a web application for a swiss banks financial intelligence unit. It was only used by a handful of people and they wanted a really rich user experience, so I wrote -- in one day -- the complete application again as a fat client. It was simply better in every way. The main client said, "That's it! That's what we want!" The director of IT said, "That's a fat client. We can't have that in the bank." The web app was never terrible, but the fat client I made them was much better and easier to create.

Everyone here who is arguing that web applications are 100% as easy to produce as fat client applications are arguing out of ignorance.

I did read the article... Web development these days is probably the easiest it's been, the only issue is IE, and that seems to be declining in usage thank goodness.

which one is easier?

1) Dealing with WinForms (or WPF) 2) Dealing with C#

vs

1) Dealing with Server-side code 2) Dealing with XHTML and CSS and JavaScript (and compressing them) 3) And dealing with IE, FF, Safari (let's leave Opera)

I'd choose web development every time as the easier option.