for me it's like this, on a form that shows a list from a table, if this list can be longer than a certain amount of rows, I don't allow fetching the rows unless the user has entered one or more filters than I can use in the where clause, otherwise I just fetch them all

I used VM Ware player and even the payed version for long time, until some years ago it became slower and slower. Then I tried Oracle VirtualBox and I never want to go back again to VMware. The performance difference is really big, the only downside I found in VirtualBox (when running on linux mint) is that copy/paste between the VM and the host often does not works, I made a shared folder to get around that.

was it ever really alive then ?

I agree that that is no good reason to hate a language. I remember having to do some changes in a VB6 project many many years ago, there was a dynamic form, which means that when the user chooses a value from a combobox than some controls could be created at runtim (depending on the choice) I don't remember if it gave a compile error or a runtime error, what I do remember is that it did not worked as we expected, so we called for microsoft support which the company paid for. Their answer was that this is by design, VB did not allow creating controls in the closeup event of a combobox... I did not liked the language before this, but at that time I did became a real hater. There are so many examples of stuff in this language that was unbelievable, there are so many reasons not to like it. But agreed, the reasons you mention are not reasons to hate it.

maybe a stupid question, but did you check your hosts file ?

Using panels and docking will be your friend. WinForms is easy to use and is very good when you need to build complicated forms. It just is not so good when your form can be resized, which is not a problem for desktop applications For real desktop applications it will remain my choice, anyday

Currently I am playing an ancient game, commando's behind enemy lines. I was talking with someone about ancient software and games and then I remembered this one, so I searched on it and found that many old games are "fixed" to run on modern windows. I guess in a week or so I loose interest again...

I don't know what this is, but it's not spaghetti code. Spaghetti code is when you break the sequential flow of your code by jumping to somewhere else, without the possibility to come back. One would think it is not used anymore these days, but that is not really true. Every time you write a return in the middle of a method you actually break the sequential flow, which is technically speaking spaghetti code. Granted this has not the disastrous consequences as the old goto, but still...

why are you putting protected methods in a region called privat methods ? Just curious

does CTRL-Ins and SHIFT-ins also still work for copy/paste ? I sure hope so

Sure, most of my projects are desktop applications and that is not because I choose it, but because it is required from the clients. It's a long way from being dead

from a debugging point of view the second is a nightmare, you need to step into the maybe to know if it happend or not. I will take the first code any time

I have some luck with the windows updates also, just the one where you get a BSOD when printing on a kyocera I had. But my file associations where not touched by the updates until now, I have firefox as standard and it remains so after updates. So, you are not that lucky after all with updates :)

Well, in XP we don't need to investigate the screen with 2 or more people to find out what row is the selected row... I like how W10 works (except the spyware off course) but I hate how it looks. We got all that PC power, we got graphical cards that have more power then old PC's, but we have such a limited GUI. Finding a button to push is sometimes a real challenge. In in that regard, XP is superior to W10

Well, in XP we don't need to investigate the screen with 2 or more people to find out what row is the selected row... I like how W10 works (except the spyware off course) but I hate how it looks. We got all that PC power, we got graphical cards that have more power then old PC's, but we have such a limited GUI. Finding a button to push is sometimes a real challenge. In in that regard, XP is superior to W10

using EF in my projects ? Are you crazy ? Have you seen what complicated queries it produces for just one simple table ? Never in my lifetime...

You should learn from this guy, binding is not evil and is not spaghetti. Binding is your friend once you get used to how it works

Yes offcourse Delphi is still used. There is a new version every year, and I must say Embarcadero has done a reasonable job at getting Delphi back to the best development environment again. After Delphi 7 Borland made bad choises which finally gave microsoft opportunity to catch up (also getting Anders from Borland into their team helped offcourse) The only backdraw is its cost, it is much to expensive in my opinion, but given a choise I would get back to Delphi immediate.

not true, there are still new projects started in Delphi today. Yes the number of users is much less then c# that is true, but as happend so often it's not always the best technology that makes it...

basic is well... to basic Pascal would be the only good choice off course