I really wish all languages had an IDE that included an interface builder as nice as Visual Studio. Making a VB.NET program really is rapid application development, because in most cases you don't even need to write more than a dozen or so lines of code.
I find programming to be easy (relatively). I find interfaces to be almost insurmountably difficult. That's the only reason I stick exclusively to command-line programs.
>I find interfaces to be almost insurmountably difficult.
Odd. Here's my 5 min explanation of how GUI programming works:
You have a bunch of objects that are responsible for generating events and painting themselves to the screen. They exist in hierarchies. You have objects that coordinate the transitions between different display states by swapping out different hierarchies (view FSMs, really.) You communicate with your domain backend thread/process through some kind of command channel. When your domain models change, they publish some events that go back through that channel to notify your display hierarchies so they can update themselves. Everything is async and through message passing.
The difficulties can be in a) setting up your hierarchy of display objects and b) getting your event routing / updating to happen in a clean way. Oh yea, and c) handling partially-complete domain models in the ui ;)
Cocoa/CocoaTouch and Flex are both quite nice environments for gui programming. I haven't used MFC, winforms or xaml/winrt..
Full disclaimer: I haven't done much UI (outside of HTML/CSS/JS, that is)... I dabbled with Visual Basic and the associated tooling (WinForms, at the time) during my college courses.
Of everything you describe, I think the area I struggled most with was:
>getting your event routing / updating to happen in a __clean__ way.
I was a naive and young programmer, so I'll withhold any criticisms towards WinForms, but the event routing was a _mess_ by the end of that project.
> I find programming to be easy (relatively). I find interfaces to be almost insurmountably difficult.
That's a personality type (mine too). Probably best to bite the bullet with HTML/CSS. I think non-web interface builders are a thing of the past. Which is too bad, because CSS is a monster to master.
I find programming to be easy (relatively). I find interfaces to be almost insurmountably difficult. That's the only reason I stick exclusively to command-line programs.