No kidding - kind of wild that winforms is still kind of a gold standard experience today! I actually liked VB Forms - lots of easy rapid application development was possible.

WPF as well

I like WPF and I code with it regularly, but the drag and drop UI builder was the worst aspect of WPF and generated terrible Xaml that was almost impossible to maintain.

Delphi was the best RAD tool though. It was native code, not a weird interpreted or jitted app. It could also build to a single exe file. VB struggled with an unwieldy engine for most of its life.

> spectacular

Not exactly the word I'd use, since it really hasn't changed since VB4, but it's definitely reliable and stable.

WinForms came way after VB4 and it was a .Net only technology.

IIRC, because of Wine, Mono has enough of WinForms to make a few things work. But who the hell wants to distribute an application with a Wine runtime?

I was going to suggest the same, just use WinForms. It's basically feature complete, and it's going to be the last UI framework Microsoft is going to yank out from beneath you.