UI is complicated and always has been. You have to be patient with it and give yourself time to absorb it. Based on how you described things, you're just start

UI is complicated and always has been. You have to be patient with it and give yourself time to absorb it. Based on how you described things, you're just starting out with Windows UI and Visual Studio. That's OK, there's nothing wrong with that. Welcome. The landscape is confusing for multiple reasons. Partly because now multiple platforms are now targetable. Partly because Microsoft bends over backward to support legacy codebases (yes, there are people still maintaining winforms apps). Partly because UI is just hard. What you'll want to do is to find a stable but relatively modern UI library. You'll want something XAML-based, so that means WPF or WinUI. WPF is "done", terminally stable and there's a lot of resources (tools, tutorials, books) available for it and it works on Win 11. If you learn it, transitioning to the more modern WinUI is not a big deal. Recommend you limit yourself to WPF or WinUI and Visual Studio. It should not take "a minute" to build an example application on a normal machine. The initial confusion with xaml-based UI wears-off quickly. You will be able to make simple one-off UI's with ease. The hard part is building non-trivial applications with it because you will quickly find that you need to use libraries for MVVM and Dependency-Injection. I use the Prism library, it's a hot mess, but it's my preferred way of making UI apps. The next major hurdle, for me at least, was customizing the UI controls. You can compose your own from the "built-in" controls and style them so they look pretty good (that's called a "User Control"). Anything more elaborate means buying UI controls from a vendor like Infragistics. You theoretically can create your own controls and package them in libraries, that's called "Custom Controls" and it's nightmarish in complexity if your end-goal is just creating applications.