Why does Microsoft make it so hard for programmers to call their application programs?

Way back when the .Net platform was first released, I was among the crowd at the Philadelphia product launch. Things started off with a large video screen with chairman Bill telling how important it was for Microsoft to make programming easy, so that people could write Microsoft application programs. It made good sense and the programming languages on .Net are okay, but what contorions one has to go through to interface to applications.

For example, to do a simple database query, you have to contend with a whole slew of objects: connections, commands, dataAdapters, parameters and datasets. To make things worse, the objects differ according to the database: Sql Server, Oracle or OleDb. Good grief! After I figured out how all the parts relate, I wrote a simple interface so that I would not have to always look under the hood to do a query. Pass in a connection string, add parameters and send in the text of the query. Get back a datatable (or a dataset if that is what you need).

I recently interfaced to Sql Report. This is a nice stand-alone application, but if you want to invoke it in code there is laughable amount of prep work, which I was only able to do by following an online example, Here I again wrote a very simple interface. Add parameters, call report and get back data which can then be copied to a file.

Why can’t Micrsoft provide simple interfaces for those who do not need to know the code at an intimate level?