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Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms.

And I am relatively young.

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WebForms can die in a fire, and thankfully has, for the most part, but WinForms is still plenty good enough for cranking out quick and dirty tools. Maybe I'm old, or it's just because I started out in high school doing VB6 forms applications, but I still prefer it unless I have a good reason, over WPF.

WinForms is also a pretty thin layer over Win32 controls, as well, so if you have to switch between .Net and native C/C++ Windows dev, it's less of a context switch.

WebForms changed the game. ASP was a sub-subset of VB, but WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time. I had never felt such power and freedom programming for the web.

Yes, some people would put humongous data structures in view state, and yes, more-better solutions have arisen, but WebForms deserves your respect!

It really doesn’t. I’ve never seen a good WebForms site / app and I’ve always dreaded working with them. They were a regressive step.

If you worked long enough with WebForms, then you'd know what an inefficient, slow and complicated event-hairball it is.

I curse every time I have to go back to any old WebForms-based project to do some changes.

> WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time.

And that is why it can go die in a fire!

>> I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms.

>> And I am relatively young.

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who worked on WinForms and never used MFC or ATL or wrote C code to the Win16/32 API :).

And I'm... er... used to be young.

I'm in my 20s, and when I was starting it was the Win32 API, in C. It really wasn't that long ago.

Unity3d is probably exposing tons of people to .net without winforms

Not all development involves GUIs. Well, let’s go even further and say most development is not GUI-related.

Business logic and algorithms is what it’s all about.

Most algorithms are reusable, while most GUI code is not.

Hence, most actual programming is happening on GUIs.

Hm, depends on the business, I guess. Because from my experience, most business algorithms are proprietary and don’t have proper specifications. You can’t just use them somewhere else. You have to recreate them from scratch.

Probably because your devs didn't write them in stored procs like they should.

Only roughly half the world believes in SP's. The other half (like me) believes that writing even the barest of hints of logic into SP's is a serious crime.

So you'd rather write the same logic in every app, and trust that every developer of every app does the same and gets it identical? Good for keeping busy I suppose but if I were your manager I wouldn't pay you for it.

We do a lot of new development in Winforms. Ironically, it's our migration path away from green screen programs.

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