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Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

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Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#3

Post by Onavo »

wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

The answer is simple, mobile and relative layouts. GUI builders are easy when you can just use absolute positioning for everything (see Retool and the dozens of Retool clones). They become insanely complex when you can't.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#7

Post by RandallBrown »

wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

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.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#8

Post by ok123456 »

Onavo wrote: post #3
wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

The answer is simple, mobile and relative layouts. GUI builders are easy when you can just use absolute positioning for everything (see Retool and the dozens of Retool clones). They become insanely complex when you can't.

Windows Forms didn't use absolute positioning for everything. You could anchor things relatively to other controls or components. You would test how things behave when you maximize and resize windows, similar to how Devtools tests reactive designs now.

If it were a very simple window or dialog that always showed the same amount of information, you would disable maximize, resize, and position it absolutely. This allowed you to add "reactivity" incrementally instead of forcing everything to be reactive up front.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#9

Post by wiseowise »

Onavo wrote: post #3
wiseowise wrote: post #2

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.

The answer is simple, mobile and relative layouts. GUI builders are easy when you can just use absolute positioning for everything (see Retool and the dozens of Retool clones). They become insanely complex when you can't.

I don’t buy it. Android has amazing Constraint/Motion layout that adapts on screen size. Instead of improving XML tooling they’ve decided to follow latest fad and created Compose.
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