The ultimate RAD was Windows Forms, in my opinion. It's been downhill ever since.

Remember how you could just "add" a database connection to your project, plop a data source on a form, then a datagrid or a bunch of text/check/comboboxes and the standard control, wire it all up in a couple clicks, and things just magically worked?

That was a lovely time to work on any kind of line-of-business app.

> Remember how you could just "add" a database [...] and things just magically worked?

You can do these in both Delphi and Lazarus, except with a much better GUI framework (comparing GUI only here, not everything you'd get with .NET). If anything having worked with Windows Forms for a while i think it was abandoned before it reached even what you could do in the midlate 90s in Delphi.

> The ultimate RAD was Windows Forms

Layouts >> fixed size window

It has that.

Data source on the form idea originated from Borland Delphi. Later, Anders Hejlsberg quit Borland to work at Microsoft, where he implemented the idea of visual and non-visual components and property editors in .net

You would be even more impressed with Delphi, because after connecting your data source, your form fills with data at design-time. Lazarus and Typhon does the same.

Yes, I'm well-aware of the genesis. In my opinion, .NET + WinForms stack was a better Delphi.

And if I remember correctly, it could also do the "fill the form with data" trick.

THe ultimate RAD was Delphi.

C# 1.0 was, to a significant extent, Delphi with a Java-like syntax (which is no wonder given who designed it), and WinForms is so much like VCL, often the only difference is the presence or absence of the "T" prefix.

By now C# is a much more powerful language, though.