Have you seen Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch?
It's scarily impressive!
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Jay-Schmelzer-Introducing-Visual-Studio-LightSwitch/
Yes, it is intended to fill a very important niche for low-end app development. The sort of niche VB used to fill, but for which .NET has really had no good story for years.
Between Lightswitch and WebMatrix Microsoft is finally providing tools that open .NET up for use outside the enterprise space - an environment that's been dominated by PHP and similar tools for some time now.
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