My guess would be so that they could make use of a single code base.

It seems that peak native Windows dev tools were Delphi 7 and VB6. It's a tragedy that something at least as good as VB6 is not still developed and supported by Microsoft.

I'm not sure how you define "native" here. If you mean native widgets then WinForms does what you want, is still fully supported, works on modern .NET versions, and Visual Studio still has all the GUI designers etc. WinForms is very obviously a calque of VCL, as well, so it can do everything Delphi did, but better.

If you mean native code then VB6 doesn't belong in this category (even if you compiled it to a standalone .exe it was still effectively bytecode).

There's nothing as good as VB6 that's developed and supported by *anyone*. It's not a Microsoft only phenomena.

I think programmers started wanting "real" languages (notice the quotes), and henceforth got more complexity and things take longer, although with GenAI, we may be back to the "draw as screen and do this" that we were with VB6. Just now the source generated should be considered the object code, and the prompt is the new source (at least for those types of apps)

I think WinForms with C# or VB is as good, if perhaps not as fun or approachable.

With restrictions of course.

I'm hoping to soon start beta testing of a similar SaaS. Just wanted to say that you and your business are a huge inspiration for me.

I had a very similar path starting with dBASE III Plus.

As you say the productivity it (xBASE/FoxPro/Clipper) offered was remarkable. One of the tools that I really wish I had was a FoxPro/Clipper compiler that took a subset of the language (general purpose stuff and screen functionality) and compiled it to either C or Go with ncurses. Who knows, I might have AI help me build one.

Look for Harbour project on github

Absolutely correct! We've lost a lot along the way.

Kudos to you! Looks very nice and well thought out. I was working on a native Windows tool for data exploration of SQLite but I shelved it.

If you don't mind my asking -- what language and toolkit do you use?

I can certainly see a lot of benefits from a team oriented web-based dashboard.

I'm building a site auditing tool with a pluggable metrics pipeline. It's implemented in Java using Javalin for API, OkHttp for fetching, and jsoup for parsing. I'm experimenting with an event sink model for metrics aggregation.

Still early, but it's definitely fun and interesting.

That could be a lot of fun to play with, especially if it has PowerVM.

POWER 8 with AS/400 AFAIK had PowerVM as mandatory requirement (runs with VIOS)

Very cool! What compilers and interpreters are available? I know that rexx wasn't available at the time that the open source vm/370 was released. Has the community found a way to add rexx?