Visual Basic 6 rebuilt in C# – complete with form designer and IDE in browser

1

Retool

I started in Visual Basic 3 and then moved to Delphi. My first job at 18 was working for one of the large ActiveX component libraries, providing technical support to many developers when I wasn't one myself yet! On my first day, I found a book on my desk—"Learn Visual Basic 3 in 21 Days"—along with a brand new 486DX250 and a 14" monitor. I learned a lot quickly! We answered support queries by fax back then. I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off. Building business apps beyond Access or Excel was so straightforward. It was great to get an .EXE that you could package up with InstallShield or Wise Solutions and send to anyone. I guess the web came soon after, and trying to do WYSIWYG for HTML and CSS has never gone well—even today. FrontPage came out but died soon after, and mixing desktop apps with web apps was never great. Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days. Sometimes, I think that for business apps, there are only so many ways to control appearance. I'd make visuals more constrained but provide the simplest visual builder possible. The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem. Even today in small businesses, there is a need to build out simple small apps that, back in the Visual Basic days, were simple to do - a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today its a minefield of options which cam quickly get expensive. I'd love to have a visual builder that creates code you can host yourself — something like retool.com but with open source and self-hosting, or maybe I'm just too old for this now! :).

#No Code #Rapid Application Development #Productivity 99 social mentions

2

Avalonia

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 146 social mentions