Code-behind was the bee’s knees.

You open up the GUI editor, drag a button onto the screen from the toolbox, give it a name/id, and double click on it which takes you to the source code file where a “buttonId_click” handler is auto created for you. Super easy to create simple GUIs without much work while still wiring together the bits that need code.

There was certainly some rough edges and I don’t know how well the workflow would have adapted to responsive design but line of business apps in controlled environments it was so powerful. VB6 and Delphi were like nothing else we have today (at least that I’ve seen).

Windows Form Designer in Visual Studio still works in that same way? This was one of the least differentiated things, really; while XCode’s interface building tools have always been clunkier they also offer the same functionality too.

The ability to rapidly build apps was amazing as a kid to learn, and I think Linux needs something similar so that small business applications can be built quickly and cheaply.

Honestly the biggest problem is the entire environment is very VCS hostile in a hard to crack way.

I've had some success getting a bunch of scripts to export MS Access database structures, but it takes over an hour to run and requires some post processing clean up so it's not really a great <feature> -> <commit> cycle.

Honestly I'd desperately like a similar experience for GTK development - a few things seem to exist, but they've never really got me building something as quickly as VB6 did.

EDIT: I mean thinking about it, the way people are using AI programming tools feels very much like a desire to actually get the VB6 - no data flow model or weird pipeline or whatever rendering BS, just "I want a control here and here's what it should do". I remain pretty sure that AI is a very expensive solution to the problem of we've been building the wrong tools and libraries for years.