Wow, totally ignores the one framework Microsoft developed that was actually a pleasure to use (WinForms). Avalon sucked IMO; it was just a continuation of the fever dream at the time of making everything XML (or XAML in that case). MFC sucked because it was C++. WinForms was that brief Window of “modern programming language with simple, elegant GUI framework”.

I know it’s not a popular opinion, and I am sure there were reasons Microsoft abandoned it, but that was a brief few years when I actually enjoyed building GUIs on Windows.