4 ms·

Honestly, I was never a fan of Basic but I still don't understand why there isn't a GUI app builder as productive as the VB6-era tools were for any language.

ChicagoDave 3y ago
Devs don’t design user interfaces anymore. There are separate disciplines for user experience, graphic design, front-end development, API development, and data storage choices. There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.
- serf 3y ago
  not everything is a team effort, and the desire espoused all over this thread for an equivalency clearly demonstrates that there is a 'market' there. when some small developer is making a silly one-off app for a mom&pop local store to facilitate a one-off kind of task they aren't interested in handing off work and splitting meager profits. not every company has the whole "front-end/back-end/devops/ux/design/management" paradigm going on. the reality is that microsoft , a fairly litigious group of people, abandoned a concept for their own reasons; and the rest of the market doesn't exactly know where they can step in that minefield of offering equivalent features to a piece of software that is still on life support by a very very large/valuable/litigious company.
  - ChicagoDave 3y ago
    There was a time when shareware ruled the world before the World Wide Web. VB was king. Even corporate America was all in on VB, Powerbuilder, and Delphi. But once the Internet truly arrived and building complex, distributed, highly interconnected systems became normal, the tools were only going to get more sophisticated.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  You should tell my employer, state Government, this.
  - ChicagoDave 3y ago
    I’ve seen an upswing in state government software engineering sophistication. Mayhaps it hasn’t reached you yet.
progmetaldev 3y ago
You can still build WinForms apps using C# or VB.NET, and they will even run on the latest .NET (v7). I built a little WinForms GUI utility that takes a CSV file with mappings from old URLs to new URLs, and generates a rewrite map for use in IIS, when rebuilding a website. I just place all my logic in a separate project so I could replace the UI in the future with a web interface or WPF, etc.

ChicagoDave 3y ago

Devs don’t design user interfaces anymore. There are separate disciplines for user experience, graphic design, front-end development, API development, and data storage choices. There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.

serf 3y ago
not everything is a team effort, and the desire espoused all over this thread for an equivalency clearly demonstrates that there is a 'market' there. when some small developer is making a silly one-off app for a mom&pop local store to facilitate a one-off kind of task they aren't interested in handing off work and splitting meager profits. not every company has the whole "front-end/back-end/devops/ux/design/management" paradigm going on. the reality is that microsoft , a fairly litigious group of people, abandoned a concept for their own reasons; and the rest of the market doesn't exactly know where they can step in that minefield of offering equivalent features to a piece of software that is still on life support by a very very large/valuable/litigious company.
- ChicagoDave 3y ago
  There was a time when shareware ruled the world before the World Wide Web. VB was king. Even corporate America was all in on VB, Powerbuilder, and Delphi. But once the Internet truly arrived and building complex, distributed, highly interconnected systems became normal, the tools were only going to get more sophisticated.
lotsoweiners 3y ago
You should tell my employer, state Government, this.
- ChicagoDave 3y ago
  I’ve seen an upswing in state government software engineering sophistication. Mayhaps it hasn’t reached you yet.

progmetaldev 3y ago

You can still build WinForms apps using C# or VB.NET, and they will even run on the latest .NET (v7). I built a little WinForms GUI utility that takes a CSV file with mappings from old URLs to new URLs, and generates a rewrite map for use in IIS, when rebuilding a website. I just place all my logic in a separate project so I could replace the UI in the future with a web interface or WPF, etc.