Comment by pjc50
4 years ago
Everyone seemingly unaware that this still exists and you can still do it in Hejlsberg's C#? Drag and drop WPF components and program in code-behind? With themes and responsive design?
(Big asterisk: mostly Windows-only and has recently lost product direction coherency)
My biggest problem with the drag and drop builders was how it played with version control. The last I used was nearly 20 years ago - Windows Visual Studio C++ with MFC. Even if the builder produced C++ code, it was hard to know exactly where and how the changes were made. CVS (and maybe svn?) didn’t exactly like tracking those changes.
Is that any better now?
One thing I really liked about Delphi was its strict separation between generated and manually-written code. Delphi had a dedicated text file format that represented the form built in the GUI builder. So, VC would just pick up changes in the form file and save them like anything else.
Also Android Studio, XCode, all the React builder websites, etc. Basically every GUI platform + IDE has some form of a drag & drop interface builder.
The problem is that outside of the iOS ecosystem, there are too many subtle differences in behavior to really trust the results. And because a lot of software gets worldwide distribution these days, it's economically worth it to squeeze that last bit of performance & user friendliness out of the framework. So most professional programmers learn how to do things programmatically and only use the interface builder if they're doing a quick internal tool.
WinForms still exists and is fine for the odd quick utility. Doing WPF without ever having to drop in the XAML is... unlikely to say the least. You're going to end up in there are one point, because styles are fucking you over or for some other reason (databinding? lol). But yes, C# is still keeping the drag & drop alive. So are plenty of tools (Lazarus, hell even Android Studio has a drag & drop designer).
Windows forms are great, whilst WPF is a bit odd,to say the least.. Here's an example:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/get-started/cs...
I would almost like WOF is component styling wasn’t one of the most miserable clusterfucks of XML boilerplate I’ve used.
Delphi still exists and you can still do it in Delphi. Responsive. Cross-platform on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux. Single codebase single UI.
Can you point to any Delphi app on the android playstore that doesn't look and feel like shit? Or a Linux app? I used to be a Delphi fan, but the results I've come across are not exactly convincing. Compare this to Flutter, which looks and feels gorgeous, at least on Android.