VCL was the best back in the days when I used Delphi 5/6, it's kinda sad if it's still true that VCL is still a front runner after a decade of near stagnation by whoever owned it at any given point.

I'll admit though that the only IDE I've used that I like as much as Delphi 6 is Intellij.

WinForms is essentially “inspired” by VCL, through Anders Hejlsberg I guess. As are some parts of C#. WPF otoh is inspired by corporate brain damage.

> WPF otoh is inspired by corporate brain damage.

Not at all, WPF is like having a monoid in the category of endofunctors for UI programming.

Its concepts of UI Lego style building blocks, with templates, commands, mvvm, multi-binding, storyboards..., might be hard to grasp if one is happy with plain code-behind snippets, but once one gets it, it is quite powerful way to write large scale UIs.

I don't know any of that terminology or category theory in general, but I'd like to assure anyone who cares that you really don't have to to get the elegance and power of WPF. It was a steep learning curve sure, but totally worth it. As far as visual control, elegance, and development-pleasure, I think it far surpasses WinForms, the Android UI toolkit, Cocoa, and the web stack. (Though XAML is annoyingly verbose.)

The only reason I stay away is because of the performance issues, and the opaque ways in which performance degrades.

> WPF is like having a monoid in the category of endofunctors for UI programming.

Takeaway: I will start using WPF right after I get a solid grasp on category theory. That will happen "very soon".

It might be powerful, but if something goes wrong it’s impossible to debug. That alone negates all of its advantages to me. I don’t like magic I can’t debug or see source code for.