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Microsoft actually did release a good tool for the non-professional segment for writing database apps called lightswitch, that was better, higher level than VB. But they stopped selling it after some time. Shame.

It's actually a general problem in the market for software development tools, somehow the market for them isn't functioning well, and some great tools that we know how to build aren't produced.

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Lightswitch was an amazing example of poor positioning. If you looked at the marketing material for it, it was positioned as a tool to "build three tier web applications" followed by a bunch of words that I didn't really understand.

It's really sad, because the tech there was really impressive.

Was that the tool that always tried to install with VS?

For a very brief period of time it was actually a standalone product that was being developed when I was at MSFT (2010ish), but eventually they just rolled it into VS.

Lightswitch was also tightly coupled with Silverlight when first released. The death of Silverlight doomed it. I believe that there is an HTML output version, but I doubt there is much interest.

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