You missed something.

With Delphi creating of Native Windows Desktop Applications is a piece of cake (also does MacOS, iOS, Android and partially Linux). Yes it is by now obscure and expensive tool but I still use it to maintain my existing native GUI desktop applications. It is incredibly easy to use / develop with and single exe no dependencies deployment mode is superior. Compatibility between Windows versions is stellar as well.

There is also an opensource version of Delphi called Lazarus which is way less polished.