Speaking as somebody who spent years developing Windows desktop apps professionally, yes this pretty much. Visual Studio is admittedly a bit bloated and can be

Speaking as somebody who spent years developing Windows desktop apps professionally, yes this pretty much. Visual Studio is admittedly a bit bloated and can be slow, but it's pretty much the only game in town when it comes to building Windows desktop apps. Jetbrains Rider might be okay, never tried it. Don't even bother trying to use any alternate text editors or you'll be in a world of pain. People used to doing development for Unixy CLI apps or web stuff tend to try to use their familiar tools when trying to do Windows desktop app development, and run into a ton of problems. The solution is, don't do that. Use Visual Studio the way it was meant to be used. Also, in the web world, it may be less of a pain to always use the newest hottest thing. Microsoft does have a tendency to produce half-baked new UI frameworks and over-hype them before abandoning them, so people used to the web world way of figuring out what to use tend to get sucked into them and then get frustrated. IMO, stick to C# WinForms to get going, and use it until you know you need something it doesn't do well.