Thanks for the read! It’s amazing how many developers there are who didn’t just start on VB, but who learned to program on VB — in other words, had their first introduction to OOP, their first time using SQL, their first encounter with web applications, etc., all in the VB world. I think that’s a large part of the reason that it’s lasted so long.

I’m not super familiar with VisualWebGUI, but I think a lot of tools like this ran into the problem of a Windows/HTML mismatch. They used things like absolute positioning in CSS to graft a Windows-like user interface onto web pages, which introduced a whole new set of problems (UIs that weren’t accessible, didn’t scale well to mobile devices or phones, didn’t adapt well to changes in content and styling, and so on). But I think there was room to abstract away some of the DOM clunkiness of JavaScript, and Microsoft never met that challenge. Other tools, like jQuery, did (and then Angular and then React), but they introduced whole new programming models & conventions that were outside of the Microsoft world.