A couple of observations
1. What gave Microsoft the commanding lead in development at one time was the quality and power of the UI designer. Even in Visual Basic 1 days, the UI designer was the core of the rapid application development (RAD) IDE, and copied by competitors. As WinForms shifts to .NET Core, and UI development in XAML (Xamarin, UWP) and HTML (Blazor) become dominant in MS development, the RAD UI designers are lacking. That takes a large part away from Visual Studio being a RAD tool when it comes to UI. MS needs to invest in some seasoned software developers at the same level of competence as the ones who originally made, and updated, the VB/VS WinForms UI designer. The current crop of MS developers apparently cannot cut it.
2. Back in the 80s and 90s, Mainsoft (and another company I cannot recall) ported the Win16 and Win32 APIs to UNIX, then Linux, and other OSs. The other company ported the VB runtime to those same platforms using Mainsoft's work. You could, literally, use the VB IDE on windows to write VB applications, then compile and run them on the other OSs. If they could do that back then, why cannot MS port WinForms to run on multiple OSs today?
A common thread here is that the quality, creativity, and production of MS developers 30 years ago is ahead of the what MS is hiring today.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
