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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft accidentally killed it moving to .NET and the increasingly stupid GUI libraries they offered up. Silverlight, 32 bit native, winforms etc and etc.

Web development meanwhile went bonkers and VB was a poor cousin to C# very suddenly.

Its a shame, VB was not for purists but it was very productive.

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Do not say WinForms is stupid. The rest I am more than okay with.

I don't think they did. They said increasingly so. They're just getting at Microsoft continually re-inventing the wheel and then abandoning that wheel when it comes to their GUI libraries. There's WinForms -> WPF -> UDP -> WinUI, Xamarin Forms -> .NET MAUI, and then the evolution of Avalonia and Uno as third-parties trying to step in. And all of those options still exist! You literally have a minimum of 8 GUI options, at least on Windows. There are of course more by external parties.

ASP .Net Core comes with it's own host of options:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo...

If I am doing desktop development, you can bet I am still using WinForms, which are relatively easy to debug (if not as pretty) as WPF. I am usually building internal tooling, without paying customers, and sometimes for a user base of just me.

Agreed, .NET (well, C# specifically) was my go to for anything with a GUI until they tried moving on from Winforms/WPF and the way forward seemed to become a large undefined mess.

It wasn't accidental.

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