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Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

(github.com)
377 points porterde | 2 comments | 14 Nov 24 21:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.432s | source
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wiseowise ◴[14 Nov 24 22:51 UTC] No.42142078[source]▶
Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits.

It looks and works so intuitively.

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RandallBrown ◴[14 Nov 24 23:12 UTC] No.42142252[source]▶
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.

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1. ericb ◴[14 Nov 24 23:44 UTC] No.42142523[source]▶
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).

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2. ygra ◴[15 Nov 24 06:47 UTC] No.42144465[source]▶
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.