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.

Seems to still be kicking around: https://github.com/dolphinsmalltalk/Dolphin

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

Caveat: Unfortunately only talks about Windows.

For the Web have a look at OutSystems for example, it doesn't come as free beer though.

Debugging in .NET is just as it used to be on VB6, not sure what you would still be missing from those days.

As for breaking the GUI, it wasn't as if frm files were foolproof.

If I recall correctly, you could write new code during debugging sessions, move the pointer to it and run it. Very dynamic. We can now do some of these things in VS or other tools with .Net, however VB was much more powerful in this regard. I can only recall there being one statement that required a rebuild - was it CreateObject or similar?

VS has been offering that since at least 2015 version, and improving on it since then.

Indeed, it's come along way and I'm not knocking it.

Point is thought this was there out the box with VB.

Agreed, at least they eventually added it back, even the Me like objects.

You can do the same thing in many languages derived from LISP, but supporting all that runtime monkey patching requires having dynamic indirections everywhere which add a ton of overhead.

For web dev, there is https://anvil.works which has a similar dev UX to VB6.

Delphi 8 could have eaten then whole native Windows pie if they hadn't tried to chase Microsoft into the .Net world. It wasn't always pretty but it was so easy to throw together business apps that got the job done.