One of the things I love about .NET 2.0 is that many tools that were previously accessible to plumbers only have been wrapped into classes that allow many more developers to access them. Two of these things are functions that I talk about in some of my conference sessions. Asynchronous Pages & Tasks and System.Transactions.
Since my talks are aimed at people who are not plumbers but still want to do brilliant things, I tend to explain a little bit of what is happening in the background but then encourage attendees to take a leap of faith. Trust that folks who *really* understand that plumbing have done a great job of putting it together and we aren't required to know all of the bits & bytes of how it works.
With Asynchronous Pages & Tasks, the magic dust is that there are AsyncHttpHandlers being used in the background. And you could write this code yourself (with a little help from Fritz Onion) but now we don't have to!
With System.Transactions, the magic dust is some cleverly orchestrated plumbing that is paying attention to the Resource Managers that are being engaged in the transaction, promoting to DTC when necessary and handling/triggering all of the commits when it's time (and a whole lot more!). Yeah, I'm glad I don't have to write that code much less acquire the PhD that I would need to write that code.
Somebody who attended two sessions where I talked about both of these things took offense at my use of the term “magic” and felt unsatisfied that I hadn't explained in detail how it was all working. My whole point is that you don't always have to understand the gorey details of the mechanics in order to take advantage of them and there are a lot of people who are much happier and more productive because of it. If you do want the gorey details, the information is definitely out there. Just google “Juval Lowy“ or “Fritz Onion“ for starters.
There is a wide world between drag and drop application development and writing your own raw compiler code. Each person has to find the place that suits them best.