No, I think you misunderstand. I'll stick with Visual Studio here because that's used as the classic example. Visual Studio does a lot of the heavy lifting when

No, I think you misunderstand. I'll stick with Visual Studio here because that's used as the classic example. Visual Studio does a lot of the heavy lifting when generating boilerplate code for things like Entity projects and ASP.NET MVC projects, and it does hide a lot of those configuration files. However, there is nothing stopping you from looking at those files, and investigating what tools VS is calling under the hood to generate them. The individual is at fault because he's not taking the time to learn what Visual Studio is doing and how C#/ASP.NET projects are organized. That exercise can be done independently of an IDE. Don't blame the IDE, it's like blaming the bread machine for not teaching you how to make bread.