I look back on Visual Basic with a mixture of trepidation and fondness. If you were a programmer who had experience of building well structured applications in

I look back on Visual Basic with a mixture of trepidation and fondness. If you were a programmer who had experience of building well structured applications in C++, Python etc. then you could get a lot of stuff done and built on Windows. If you inherited a bad application, however....it was really bad. You can't deny its importance to desktop applications though. The switch to VB.Net was the first time that you couldn't simply take your existing code and recompile it in a new version and carry on adding new features. That's where VB.Net, and .Net in general, simply didn't take off. Most people found out they simply didn't need or even want the complexity of full object oriented development either. What Microsoft should have done was built a rapid development environment on top of .Net, distinct from programming in C#, that allowed you to take classic VB code and simply recompile it. The switch to .Net has never really happened for Microsoft and if anyone has been rewriting applications they are as web applications or mobile apps - which Microsoft are not a part of. It will be seen as a pivotal moment where Microsoft simply lost developers. You see it now with pandering to bringing Bash to Windows, amongst other things. No one cares about Windows development.