I'll be doing some catch up on both reading and writing blog entries over the next couple of days, so please forgive me. The first cab off the rank is a response to this post on partial types by Alex Hoffman.
When I first started working with .NET I was a bit of a Don Box clone and only used Emacs - admittedly that was back when we were talking about an Alpha of a V1 IDE and the framework was called NGWS.
Over the last couple of years I think I have grown up a bit (you hear that Don? I think you need to grow up! :P) and accepted that I can't write all the code in my applications - using development tools to generate code (whether it be declaritive or procedural) is to my mind "risk free delegation". All of a sudden components, and their designer serializer are responsible for correctly persisting their setup code and in many cases their clean-up code as well!
Alex asserts that:
"for those few developers remaining who actually write code, its likely to just result in hidden code and confusion"
I can see where you are coming from Alex, I've opened up the "code-behind" on more than one occasion and wondered where all my code is, but I feel this is just my reaction to having such a clean surface to work from.
You see I usually know the names of the components that I have dropped on my design surface so its not a stretch to remember them, and anyway, if you are a few hundred lines down in the code you can't see the field declarations anyway.
I agree that this feature exists because of development tools. But I turn it on its head. I say its because Microsoft wants to provide tooling but doesn't want it at the cost of your carefully crafted source code (how many InitializeComponent nuke jobs have you heard of?).