The WinForms Notepad Project (2022): Reviving a Classic (Premium)

For my January 2022 programming project, I’m reviving the Windows Forms (WinForms) version of .NETpad so I can make it available publicly on GitHub. And then I’ll look into modernizing it as I wrote previously in .NETpad Resurrections (Premium).

As it turns out, this required more work than I had expected.

For reference, I pushed all four of my .NETpad versions---Visual Basic/WinForms/.NET Framework 4.x, C#/WinForms/.NET Framework 4.x, C#/Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)/.NET Core 3.1, and C#/Universal Windows Platform (UWP)---to my GitHub account about a year and a half ago, intending to make them public. And then I didn’t, for no reason I can think of. I got lost in researching other programming projects, time went by, and here we are.

Flash forward to today, and things have changed more than a bit since I first started these projects. Microsoft .NET has advanced from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5 and then .NET 6. Incredibly, Microsoft has started updating WinForms again, despite it being a 20+-year-old technology. And Visual Studio has progressed from version 2019 to 2022.

Anyway. In reviving these projects, starting of course with the only one I didn’t document on Thurrott.com, the C#/WinForms/.NET Framework 4.x version, I discovered that each needed to be cleaned up and fixed in some way. So I obviously needed to do that work before I could make them available, in turn, to you.

I’m not a professional programmer or a Visual Studio expert, so I eventually needed help with some of the issues I was experiencing. And so I naturally turned to Rafael Rivera---who is a professional programmer and a Visual Studio expert--for the answers. As always, he’s been a godsend, and he got me over some humps that otherwise would have caused me to simply start over from scratch. I was literally going down that path when he saved the day.

I also originally wrote a rather tedious 2500-word article (over) detailing the problems I encountered while updating and fixing the C#/WinForms/.NET Framework 4.x version of .NETpad. But since you won’t need to make these changes yourself, I sat on it for several days and then ultimately decided not to bore you with it. Instead, I will quickly explain each issue and fix, in turn, here.

To get started, I installed Visual Studio 2022 Community and configured it with the workloads I will need for all of my .NETpad projects: .NET desktop development and Universal Windows Platform Development, plus Desktop development with C++ because I can’t help myself and you never know. Then, I cloned---basically, made a local copy of---the C#/WinForms/.NET Framework 4.x version of .NETpad onto my laptop in Visual Studio to see where it was at.

And then I tried to build and run it, of course. How naïve of me.

Given that .NETpad worked perfectly when I last did this, I was surprised to see that there build errors, and that at least one of these errors meant that I couldn’t even run the appl...