/ blog / archive — 3 entries
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Field notes from 35+ years in the trenches. Mostly C# / .NET / Avalonia,
some Rust, rants about OOP, retro emulation, and whatever weird thing has me up at 2am.
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vb6
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2026 // current cycle
0x15
2026.05.21
VB on Avalonia: the VB6 form-and-handler model, cross-compiled to Linux from Visual Studio 2026
I spent a weekend proving the VB6 loop is alive outside Windows. Visual Basic on Avalonia 11, .NET 10, Visual Studio 2026, two update patterns side-by-side, and the same VB source publishing to a 47 MB self-contained win-x64 .exe and a 47 MB self-contained linux-x64 ELF. No first-party VB template for Avalonia, so the .vbproj is hand-rolled. Everything downstream behaves normally. Full source and two build guides on GitHub.
7′
0x0D
2026.04.30
What did you love about VB6, and what frustrates you about modern .NET?
Two open questions for anyone who shipped real work on Visual Basic 6 and is now writing C# against modern .NET. What specifically did VB6 get right that you miss? And what do you find frustrating about the modern toolchain that VB6 didn't make you fight? I shipped about a hundred VB3-through-VB6 line-of-business systems between 1995 and 2010, and I'm trying to get to the root of what was actually good before too much of the institutional memory leaves the room.
4′
0x06
2026.04.27
Visual Studio 2026 still ships the form designer Alan Cooper drew in 1987
Every UI framework Microsoft has shipped since WinForms (2002) was sold as its successor. WPF, Silverlight, UWP, MAUI, Blazor desktop. Twenty-four years on, WinForms is still there, on modern .NET, with a designer that any VB6 developer would recognise on sight. The Cooper and Geary form-designer architecture from 1987 is still the path of least resistance for a working line-of-business app in 2026, and that is not an accident.
12′