They’ve come a long way from the “bad old days” of doing GUI apps with MFC under Visual C++ 6 where you had the wonderful “black box” message framework you weren’t supposed to touch but always had to anyway.  I managed to make a GUI app today with Windows Forms to read data off a CAC card so I don’t have to keep relying on the command-line driven app I wrote for testing a while back.  No black boxes, no hand editing message maps, no hand driving message pumps to get things done.  And the cool thing is it might run under Mono too.

While I still prefer Qt for most everything, Visual Studio now isn’t bad for the times I have to write source under Windows.