> self-contained exes

Not really. The VB6 exes required a huge runtime to be installed. Plus all the visual controls lived inside of OLE DLLs als native code and you had to ship these too (and register them on the target machine)

This was the biggest motivator for me to move to Delphi because that actually produced self-contained exes and allowed you to call any Windows API directly without any COM wrappers in between.

And you had a real type system. And pointers. But you still had an easy GUI editor and a very good class library that was incredibly easy to use.

> Also very cool was the documentation, complete, offline and and with lots of examples.

I think 'online' [1] is the word you wanted to use. ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_help

Well yes it was online in that sense, which was great. But what I meant to point out was that the complete MSDN help library came shipped on two CDs that you could locally install. It was really really good. There was a description, detailed background info, and usually at least a few example code snippets using the function. I was later a astonished at how sparse and useless documentation for many other libraries/languages was compared to that, especially when it came to example usage. Some notable disappointments included e.g. the Java/JDK docs (v1.4) and the early Android docs (v1), which both required looking at the code because the docs were severely lacking (both have improved by now).

I think you can still download the whole MSDN help library for offline use, but I don't believe that nowadays that would be enough for daily work use. Lots of useful info and example use is scattered around blog posts and StackOverflow answers now, instead of being a part of the documentation itself.