The WYSIWYG GUI builder that VB provided, I have never encountered afterwards again in quite that manner.
Now, in VBs heyday the field of UX design we now have as a profession adjacent to software development was in its infancy and was usually an implicit part of the developers job. What was lost with the demise of the RAD tools was a potentially shared medium of expression. Today designers build Potemkin villages in Figma and the likes, throw them over the fence and as a developer I then need to reverse-engineer them. How much more productive would it be if they didn't throw something over the fence but would actually build the UI in the same tool that the developer uses to write the logic behind it?
And another thing: I don't know if I had gotten into the field without BASIC. I started with QBasic, because it was the only thing readily available and switched over to VB when I got my hands on a students' edition. The thing that distinguished these two from educational environments like Scratch or Logo is that I could build actually useful stuff for myself with it.
The WYSIWYG GUI builder that VB provided, I have never encountered afterwards again in quite that manner.
At the time I think delphi did that concept in a better way, and I definitely switched from VB to Delphi as soon as I learned about it. Delphi still exists to this day.
There are also many low code platforms which have a VB-like UI builder, like mendix, or outsystems or microsoft’s power platform, but they tend to be a bit too enterprisey where VB was really the people’s champion.
I think canvas apps in power platform give much of the “feel” of dragging and dropping visual basic forms and let you build actually useful stuff, while targeting web and mobile. The downside of power platform is that as soon as you try to do anything serious with it you need the premium stuff and end up paying a lot. That makes it less suited to take up the niche that VB and Access had, because that niche mostly can’t afford power platform. Contrast that with scratch which is free to use and has a large community of “regular people” sharing cool stuff. Intuitively it seems that Microsoft should make power platform entirely free and use it as a lure for azure paid services, but then it is easy for me to spend their money.
By the way, I still don’t understand how power apps on iOS are according to apple’s guidelines, because you can use it to ship mobile apps to iOS users while entirely bypassing apple.
I remember in Access(for like $100 one time) and how you could use a wizard to build like a contact manager with all the tables and forms. I always thought that was really cool. Now I guess you can spend like $30/user per month or something like that.
I think the WYSIWYG WPF and Silverlight tools were pretty close to VB6 level of usability. The tools are great for building a quick UI, but I think they fall short for more complex applications.
This is why designers have their own preferences when it comes to designing the UX, to give them the flexibility to create the UI as they see fit. When different teams are working on a shared goal, there can always an element of "throw it over the fence".
As a developer, I always saw part of my job as getting plugged in with the other teams as much as possible. Providing continuous advisement and feedback on UX patterns as projects progress really helps things move smoothly.
I would argue that "more complex applications", when it comes to UI, are an anti-pattern. Use standard widgets, and don't be creative.
Of course "standard widgets" don't really exist anymore because of where UI design has gone, but they did provide a consistency that users could rely on. That is gone now. Buttons don't even look like buttons anymore.
The GUI builder of VB6 fell apart the moment you wanted to do a resizable window. Here "more complex applications" = "window that you can resize or maximize".
VB.NET/WinForms (and competitors like Qt Designer) had a pretty good solution for widget placement on resize, all within the GUI builder. So i don't think this was fatal, if Classic VB had survived a bit longer it likely would have been added too.
(Although to date they don't have a great solution for responsive layouts.)
Now, in VBs heyday the field of UX design we now have as a profession adjacent to software development was in its infancy and was usually an implicit part of the developers job. What was lost with the demise of the RAD tools was a potentially shared medium of expression. Today designers build Potemkin villages in Figma and the likes, throw them over the fence and as a developer I then need to reverse-engineer them. How much more productive would it be if they didn't throw something over the fence but would actually build the UI in the same tool that the developer uses to write the logic behind it?
And another thing: I don't know if I had gotten into the field without BASIC. I started with QBasic, because it was the only thing readily available and switched over to VB when I got my hands on a students' edition. The thing that distinguished these two from educational environments like Scratch or Logo is that I could build actually useful stuff for myself with it.