But you didn't even have to open the references dialog to create an application. VB was great because it made easy stuff easy but it also made more difficult s

But you didn't even have to open the references dialog to create an application. VB was great because it made easy stuff easy but it also made more difficult stuff possible. You could reference other libraries, of course. You could also directly call Win32 APIs. But you didn't need to that. You didn't need any boilerplate or ceremony -- you could drop a button on a form, double-click on it to add code, and make it do something without knowing anything about the infrastructure to make that possible. As far as I know, there are no tools that do something equivalent now that aren't so sandboxed that it's a dead end.