Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

This is fairly similar to how Interface Builder in Xcode works for macOS and iOS apps.

Like others have said, it works well until you need to support different screen sizes, layouts, animations, touch interaction, etc.

I can't speak to Interface Builder, but in VB 6 Hooking resize was SO easy, and the math you do inside it was so easy, too. It took maybe 5 minutes to do almost any layout.

It was frankly, a shock to see how easy this model was and then see the monstrosity that came to pass for HTML and CSS positioning. Baffling.

Everything you just listed was easy in VB 6 IMHO (well, touch wasn't a thing exactly).

90s toolkits had "layout managers" to avoid hardcoding widget locations and sizes. Might need to extend a feature or two but probably could have been done without starting from scratch.

  > This is fairly similar to how Interface Builder in Xcode works for macOS and iOS apps.

Having extensive experience with both: Hard, hard disagree. They might look similar in static screenshots but work completely differently.

Totally agree with your second point and I wish Microsoft would have addressed that. Maybe they have. The last time I messed with their stuff I was writing XAML.

Anyone know if they brought RAD back?

Edit: apparently they had/have layout managers.

Having done a few such forms in the past, it was easy enough for a simple dialog with a list, two buttons and a text field, but it quickly got unwieldy.

Which was okay back in the day. Everyone had low display resolutions, so simply scaling a window's controls when resizing was okay. No need for responsive layout and even too fancy layouts, I guess. But what we got later with anchor in WinForms, layout panels in WinForms or WPF, layout managers in Swing, and CSS layout die help reduce the math you'd have to do yourself, especially for more complex layouts or even when the layouts change due to different requirements.

Most of those builders, including VB, have the option to support dynamic layouts, it is up to devs to actually learn to use them, instead of the default approach.

So - to answer you two points:

Interface Builder was a lot more like VB and Delphi in the past, but around the time of iOS 3, Apple completely broke the UI programming metaphor in it. It used to be all drag and drop (with quirks) but actions were like event handlers and outlets like events. Before it was "code first" you could do it all in the UI. I used it quite a bit before XCode existed (XCode used to be ProjectBuilder, even on like Jaguar/Panther IIRC) and it was very close to the version of the same on OpenStep.

Xaml designer - well, the designer is not really a thing because Xaml is usually not created as an absolute layout. There was a version of the Xaml designer early on that would attempt to build a UI that looked absolute, but it did a lot of horrible Xaml markup in the background and made maintaining the UI way harder than it should have been. We (Xaml users) all migrated to using it as pure markup and mos of us now use hot-reload over a designer.

> Interface Builder was a lot more like VB and Delphi in the past, but around the time of iOS 3, Apple completely broke the UI programming metaphor in it.

I guess I can see your point. I started with IB on OPENSTEP, then onto macOS in the 10.1 days. But even back then, I still think the feel wasn't quite the same, from my subjective viewpoint.

I keep having these strong urges of using Windows again and creating WinForms apps. But then I go and use Windows for a day and the lack of polish is so jarring. But gosh, Microsoft development was almost always fun.