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I wish you had tried C# with WinForms which is still has the best GUI development tooling in Visual Studio.

> As mentioned, my past experience with GUIs was with WinForms, and so I wanted to see what had changed or improved in the intervening years.

They didn’t need to because they already had WinForms as a baseline experience for Windows UIs.

If I was still doing Windows development, I would likely still be using Winforms to this day - you can't beat it from a purely functional prototyping tool even if it doesn't produce the most aesthetic GUIs ever.

It's a great successor to IMHO one of the other all time best RAD environments, Visual Basic. (Though I've head Pascal had some really nice out-of-the-box tools for GUI work)

Delphi has an amazing RAD environment. For building small, self-contained desktop apps (with cross-platform support!) it beats any other modern offering... if you can get past the ecosystem. The language and ecosystem very much show their age.

Anyway, I think this generation is missing out on the experience of building in a real RAD environment. I'm more on the backend, but from what I see the pinnacle is fast hot reload, which pales in comparison to what could be.

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