I don' fully agree, only because I was rather on the other side of the fence with Delphi/C++ Builder. :)

I always considered .NET a step backwards, versus doing something similar to what Borland was doing with Delphi/C++ Builder, meaning C# and VC++ should have provided better tooling based on COM, and then follow up with VB7.

Ironically, when they tried to actually do that, with WinRT, they messed up the whole execution.

VB6 was the last "real" VB program before .NET obsoleted it.

I used it for decades when I was young, and I have never again used anything that was as good, as simple, as precise and as feature-complete. Debugging in VB6 was incredible. An incredible feat that I'm not sure has been repeated since? Perhaps the debugging capabilities of MSVC has caught up these days, in which case, kudos to them.

Maybe something exists today in the form of webdev? I wouldn't know as I'm stuck in the deep-end (backend).

I have used .NET the last few years. I made a full desktop application for someone, and I also wrote a map/level editor for a game in it. I have to say that I like C# a lot, but I don't like the editor, I don't like the graphical construction source file, because it's so easy to break your GUI. And I also hated the fact that drawing was slow on .NET no matter how hard I tried to make it fast.

Dolphin Smalltalk was fantastic for this and produced comprehensible, maintainable code with beautiful GUIs. It is a shame that great products have to die because the mediocre ones catch on.

Apparently last modified 8 days ago, with a history of infrequent but steady commits.

Caveat: Unfortunately only talks about Windows.