C# with winforms in visual studio using the gui builder is basically the same experience as vb6 but better in every way. I'm honestly not sure why complaints ab

C# with winforms in visual studio using the gui builder is basically the same experience as vb6 but better in every way. I'm honestly not sure why complaints about legacy vb6 being killed tend to overlook this, but I think it's because there are lots of people who have fond memories of vb6 but have simply never tried c# with winforms. If you want that experience, you can literally get it right now as long as you're ok making desktop apps that will only run on windows and don't mind that it may look somewhat out of place among more recent windows apps using WPF and its successors. The real question then isn't why microsoft "abandoned" visual basic (they replaced it with something that is strictly better), but why people aren't using winforms or something similar in 2023. I think that's because 1) it isn't cross platform and 2) people have lots of other requirements that are difficult in winforms. Aside from being cross-platform, I guess the winforms api requires you to manage a lot of stuff like data bindings by hand that people are used to having work automatically. People also want good support for various monitor sizes, although .net winforms is actually much better about that than vb6 because it has pretty decent layout controls so you don't have to write code to handle resizes to the same extent. The fact is, the vb6 gui builder worked best if you just ignored resizing and only had to worry about one screen resolution, and even though .net winforms is better about that, it's still fairly complicated to use the layout controls to handle resizing properly I think there was actually a project that was attempting to make a winforms-style api for Avalonia which would actually fix some of the problems including cross-platform support (including mobile; avalonia is pretty slick and it's unfortunate that microsoft hasn't just hired the people making it rather than focusing on stuff like winui and maui), but I think it stalled because among people making desktop windows applications there simply isn't that much interest in using a winforms style api in 2023.