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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

.NET with Windows Forms - either C# or VB.NET, depending on your taste - is very similar in experience, and is still a fully supported stack today even in the most recent .NET versions (so you get e.g. high-DPI support, dark mode etc) with new features added regularly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/wh...

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Except if you need to touch COM.

The RCW/CCW approach is much more low level, to the point there are whole books on how to use COM in .NET, whereas it was just part of how to program in VB (pre-.NET).

It also went through two reboots.

So now you have .NET COM support for .NET Framework, COM/WinRT support for UWP, modern .NET support for COM.

Every variation with its own APIs, only the classical .NET Framework approach has Visual Studio "import COM component" support, and none of them as easy as VB 6 was in the end.

Quite bad as developer experience, given the COM focus since Windows Vista.

Thanks for sharing! I'm glad Microsoft is still providing active development for WinForms and on recent .NET Core versions and not just .NET Framework, although the later seems to still be supported indefinitely (for now?). [0]

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/microso...

Oldschool .NET Framework is a Windows component now, so as far as support goes, it is treated the same as any other OS component - meaning that it's supported for as long as the corresponding OS is.

How long that will be remains to be seen. But Windows still ships the VB6 runtime (MSVBVM60.DLL) in the box today, 27 years since it was first released: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

I suspect that .NET will last just as long given the sheer amount of enterprise software that was written for it - even today there are places that target it in lieu of the new OS-independent .NET versions.

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