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Would it have been an option to embed the Win32 DLL as a resource in your exe and extract it at runtime?
Phil
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the author, especially if you find them impolite, inaccurate or inflammatory.
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I tossed that around for a bit. I can't leave the .DLL behind, so I would have had to do the whole LoadLibrary thing in a separate AppDomain, make the call, unload the AppDomain, then delete the .DLL. Messy.
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My opinion is right for me, but it may not be right for you. But your opinion would be useful.
The Windows Form Designer, from the VB days to Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Framework 4.8 is an amazingly productive tool. The time it takes to build a window like I want, create to the code skeleton for events, etc. is drastically reduced from hand-coding. Thus, in a given amount of project time, I now have more time to spend improving the project, doing more testing, or even adding features. Those things would not be possible without the Designer.
Now, consider XAML Forms and HTML pages for Blazor. No designer. Even a Windows Forms designer in .NET Core 3.0 is missing, for now. Adding those designers would have the same effects for those environments and productivity that the Forms Designer did for VB and Visual Studio.
Microsoft's team of millennials and Gen-Z'ers appear to not have the depth of experience, or concepts of value engineering, to know why a GUI designer is so valuable.
That said, what are your opinions of how important it is to have Xamarin XAML and Blazor HTML designers on a par with the .NET Framework Windows Forms Designer?
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MSBassSinger wrote: HTML designers
Years ago I stopped doing web forms in Design mode because it didn't do a good job generating the html.
But generally speaking, yes, I think the designer can make things much quicker.
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Pretty much won't touch Xamarin XAML because of the lack of a designer. Won't touch WPF because it lacks a usable designer. While I'm stuck with HTML, tools that let you do side-by-side HTML with preview mitigate the pain.
And yes, very important. I remember when I came out with MyXaml and almost everyone (some rather nastily) said they'd never use a UI generator where you had to edit the "markup" by hand.
And guess where we are now? And guess what camp I'm in when it comes lack of designers. 
That said, if I can avoid having to even touch HTML, the happier I am. I don't mind writing HTML generators (usually client-side on the fly) that create the HTML from some metadata format. But that's me.
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Marc Clifton wrote: Won't touch WPF because it lacks a usable designer
For what it's worth Marc, it's not that hard. I've been doing WPF UI's for over ten years now. WPF 'design' in XAML lends itself well to a top-down, organization first then detail approach.
Software Zen: delete this;
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of the three UI's supported by dotnet; my level of productivity is quickest with Winforms, followed by UWP, and lastly is WPF. WPF for me is just not as "discoverable" as the other two formats, even when using Blend.
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Matt McGuire wrote: Blend
I've never been able to use Blend. It only has a "dark" user interface (even the so-called light theme is gray over darker gray) and is unusable to my middle-aged vision.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I use the XAML designer with WPF, but only to see what the resulting layout is. I do the XAML by hand as I don't like some of the things the designer does when using it's ability to drag and drop or move things around.
It would be nice if VSCode had a visual designer, I think it would make the process quicker.
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I agree, the designer is nice to see how your product is building but had issues in the old asp.net days with it doing some weird things in the raw html.
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As someone who once used FrontPage[^] and Visual InterDev 97[^], all I can say with regards to WSYWIG HTML editors is: never again.
They make it really easy to design things that work on your precise screen resolution, which then fall apart the moment someone resizes the browser window by 10px.
The same thing applied to the WPF designed the last time I tried that.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: The same thing applied to the WPF designed the last time I tried that.
Which is why I do the XAML by hand, but use the designer to see how it would look like.
The problem with that specific designer is that it creates absolute layouts, instead of relative.
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MSBassSinger wrote: The Windows Form Designer, from the VB days to Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Framework 4.8 is an amazingly productive tool. The time it takes to build a window like I want, create to the code skeleton for events, etc. is drastically reduced from hand-coding.
Long time WinForm user here, and I'm quicker without the designer. "Click, go to properties, undock, move, paste in new panel, redock".
Also seen to many people draw dialogs, with a panel docked to the bottom, containing a panel docked to the right, containing two buttons returning either DialogResult.OK or DialogResult.Cancel. Forms do support inheritance, so you code it once and stop drawing. Has the added advantage that when you want to change the dialogs to have menu's instead of buttons (or whatever), you simply change the base.
So, it may seem a productivity-booster, and it is - for quick and dirty prototyping.
Similarly, you can use databinding from the designer and create working applications. The drawback is that your form doesn't update during processing - so I'll be writing code to do so on a backgroundworker, giving feedback to the user with a progressbar. No databinding here 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I personally avoid those that don't have the designers. Sometimes I cannot remember how to do something or I want quick and dirty. Those designers work wonderfully for each of those things. I can visually "draw" it on the screen and then go look and see how it was built. It ends up being faster than the same google search. I am probably in the minority though.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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The WinForms designer is not without faults (derive a control from an abstract UserControl base and start swearing for example) but by heck it makes life easier!
That's one of the things that - still - makes WPF feel "unfinished" and somewhat amateur to me. If you can do it for C# code, why the heck not do it for more organised and structured XML?
I was looking forward to Blazor but you do need a good designer to give you a WYSWYG "starter" or you waste too much effort before you can start to work on the actual "working stuff".
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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OriginalGriff wrote: That's one of the things that - still - makes WPF feel "unfinished" and somewhat amateur to me. If you can do it for C# code, why the heck not do it for more organised and structured XML?
Have you looked at the crappy XML based designer for SSRS. Access was far more powerful and easy to use. This is probably why MS hasn't built a decent designer for XML based UIs.
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I thought all my birthdays had come at once, when I started using the VS.NET designer. Writing UI code to cope with resizing, docking and so on used to drive me mad.
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Quote: Microsoft's team of millennials and Gen-Z'ers appear to not have the depth of experience, or concepts of value engineering, to know why a GUI designer is so valuable.
There is a lot of regression taking place all over Microsoft's products (think also for most of the other IT companies). It comes from these same people. They are all self centered in addition to what you have observed, and as a result have no clue how people are actually using their software.
Email is a prime example. The usability is degrading due to Fort Knox security requirement they impose on everything regardless if the user needs it.
Cannot travel anywhere away from my office to trigger a whole series concerned emails and requirements to keep using my email. Try traveling outside of the country then it gets even worse reaching a point where I just not use email because it is too much of a hassle.
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Interesting discussion. The reason it interests me is that for the last 20 years I have been developing GUI tools for a niche market (Powerbasic) and one of the things I built which it lacked was a Visual Designer. Visual Designers are not easy to build. I spent 20 years writing my own GUI framework (WIN32) with a Visual Designer engine built into it and when I looked for information about how to write a drag and drop engine specific to programming Visual Designers, there simply wasn't any. There are no native high level API's in the Windows WIN32 for this. Many indie programming languages have come into existence over the years, some hobby languages, others professional level, but the one thing they often lack is a decent Form designer. The reason is that it is not easy to build one.
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If it were easy, everyone could do it.
The fact that the MS VB team did it in the late 1980s, and re-writing the VB IDE in assembler no less, shows that the right folks on the right team with the right leadership and vision can do that which is "not easy".
Why has MS failed to hire that caliber of developers, testers, and leadership for UI tooling in Visual Studio?
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Long time WinForms coder here, and before that, C++/MFC for many years. I dont use the designer in web apps much, except to add a control in general and then I go to the code. In WinForms, the designer is a huge time saver IMO, even though sometimes it gets confused and I have to drop into the generated code and fix things. In VC++, and I go back to version 1.52 (and before that, yes, I'm old), the designer was much less useful, but it still did a lot of work for you. Use bare XML to do a form layout? No, I'd rather not.
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I completely agree with your assessments regarding the Windows Forms Designer.
However, I have been developing with WPF(XAML) for quite a while now so I have seen the changes in the WPF Forms Designer over the years.
And it is still as bad as it always has been since very little of it makes any sense from a visual perspective.
Using the WPF Designer appears to work the same as the old Java forms designers, which I found to be completely useless.
As a result, I simply use the XAML Markup Editor that is tied to a WPF window or Page...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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In general, drag and drop, point and click is easier to use and approach. But.... with something like WPF, coordinates can be specified in terms of relative or absolute, and the organization of your containers and how they're setup is relevant too. It doesn't lend itself to a drag and drop approach. You can drag a window and drop it somewhere, and there are several ways the designer could format the code and it can't guess what you actually want. Only you know that. I've only used it a little bit, but I found the xaml editor more helpful. It reminded me of webforms, speaking of which, I never use the designer for web forms. I'm terrible with making pretty web forms, so I just create the elements I need, get it functional and pass it off to our web designer guy who does CSS against everything. He too, hates the designer because it gives you no idea at all what your page is going to actually look like. With Win32 API the designer makes sense, all coordinates are absolute so there is only 1 answer when it comes time to using the code. But even here, I put everything in table or flow layout panels and use those to control the layout logic. I never let anything just sit in a parent container, many of our applications are language translated and having things sit in absolute coordinates is a recipe for disaster.
And given that designers are easier if you're lazy, I would think millenials would be all about making them a top priority. I doubt the lack of a designer is because of millenials.
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You do know that Windows Forms has been doing relative or absolute for quite a while? Including docking options for UI components.
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