The WinForms Notepad Project: What’s Next? (Premium)

It’s time to think about what’s next for .NETpad, a project I had originally hoped to finish up by the end of 2019. But I don’t mind that it’s kept me busier for longer than I expected. That simply means that we were able to duplicate (or at least approximate) far more of Notepad’s functionality than I originally thought was possible.

And to be clear, it was definitely “we” and not “me.” There is functionality I’m not sure I’d have ever figured out, like Find, Find Next, and Find Previous, and Replace and Replace All, all of which is credited to reader Michael Lerch. And printing, which was solved almost 20 years ago by programming legend Charles Petzold. And then dozens of smaller issues that were found by readers.

Obviously, I wish I could have figured this all out on my own, but I’m glad for the interaction and the help, and I recognize my limitations as a would-be developer. If you think back to my original post in this series, I noted that I wouldn’t be teaching you how Visual Basic or any programming language works. But as many of you probably realized even then, I had hoped that we might learn together. That in teaching myself how Visual Basic.NET, Windows Forms, and the .NET Framework might be used to create a recognizable Windows application, at least some of you would follow along and learn something in the process as well.

I sometimes write about the many side projects I’ve created at different points in this series to isolate a problem and find something that works. And I’ve created dozens and dozens of them, some of which did indeed lead to specific functionality in .NETpad. But there are others that led to dead-ends. My various attempts at understanding how printing works in Windows Forms, for example, or the several projects aimed at understanding text file encoding (which is very much broken in Windows Forms/.NET, and possibly just in general because of the differences between how Windows and other platforms handle this.)

One thing I also did fairly recently and over two or three days was to go back through the series and attempt to use my articles to recreate .NETpad from scratch. That was pleasant because it worked great, and I felt like the instructions were mostly pretty clear. I won’t ever do this, in part because Windows Forms is so old-fashioned now, but I could see transforming this into a project-based book or perhaps part of such a book. It was actually pretty fun to go through it.

I’ve also started making a new version of the project in C#, Microsoft’s much more popular and syntactically complex programming language. This is a bit hard to explain, but it’s very clear that Visual Studio’s support for C# is more advanced than that for Visual Basic, and it has prompted me with a plethora of warnings that I never see for the similar code in VB. That is a challenge in its own right, and while I feel that C# has a more obvious future and is thus perhaps the “bett...