I never fully understood why we couldn't have the VB/Winform model of building GUI on the web. Is it because we need the designer skinnable GUI? With WebAssembly and CSS grid layout, could we finally get a modernize VB/Winform?
Because they used to produce dubious code leading to poor rendering result.
I would like to say the Web was poorly designed but that would be too generous. The Web wasn’t designed at all. It’s a hodgepodge of poorly thought out technologies hastily cobbled together. It’s a piece of technology designed to display static textual content horribly contorted to make applications.
It took decades for JS and CSS to reach a state I consider barely useable and the best we could do is apparently flexbox.
Ten/Twelve years ago me and a colleague would build random desktop apps using WinForms and C#, they were deployed using a network share and ClickOnce. They weren't the most elegant pieces of software ever developed, but it sure was easy to slap together a small tool for the warehouse manager or someone in sales.
You can still do all that, on Windows. As I get older and have more experience, I have come to the conclusion that some people are more interested in the technology and less so in solving actual problems. While I'm pretty happy with my career, if I were to do it all over: Windows, Visual Studio, C++ and WinForms would have been the tools that I'd have picked. We're coming up on 25 years of a fairly stable, actively developed platform with pretty good backwards compatibility.
Maybe I missed some opportunities but with my later experience and in my line of work I got pushed towards webapps and these days PowerBI. I can make those work but I feel that as a beginner with VB6 I could build forms faster than I can do now in a browser.
Also, I remember not being completely precise: I maintained a hacked together GUI build in Access VBA. It had its warts but its web-based replacement didn't blow it out of the water and took longer to develop.
