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When I first started writing the poorly-named Programming Windows series in mid-2019, I eventually ran into a wall named .NET: this was the point in the history I was trying to cover---the very early 2000s---in which I stopped my formal developer work to focus on writing, allowing my employer, Duke Publishing, to handle the backend work on my websites. It was also the beginning of one of the most exciting times for Microsoft stack developers, the .NET era, but because I wasn’t as familiar with the technical bits as I had been with what had come before, work on the series ground to a halt. I needed time to figure this stuff out.

(I was also hoping that .NET expert Richard Campbell would finish his highly researched book about the history of .NET, but I’m still waiting on that, unfortunately.)

To familiarize myself with Windows Forms---a pre-.NET framework----and then the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), I did what any developer would do: I read as much as possible and started coding myself. Windows Forms was a comfortable way to ease into things because it was so clearly based on Visual Basic (VB), about which I was once quite familiar. And it occurred to me that there might be a story for the Programming Windows series that was about how much work one could accomplish using these environments without actually writing any (C# or VB) code. (WPF does require you to write code, XAML code, to construct application UIs.)

And that’s how the first version of what became .NETpad came about: I used Windows Forms to visually duplicate Notepad as accurately as possible, and then I started writing VB code to make it work. I figured I wouldn’t get very far and that that would be fine: this thing would still stand as an interesting example of how much was possible without writing code. And then maybe someone with actual coding skills could come along and finish it. That’s how things work in the real world, after all.

But the WinForms/VB version of .NETpad turned into a version based on C#, giving me a familiar project to recreate while learning the new (to me) language. And that turned into the WPF version of the app that is still my favorite. And then to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version that is weird in some ways, but wonderful and modern in others.

All this took many, many months, of course. What I had intended as a short one-off had turned into a massive series of projects and article series that occurred outside of, and perhaps parallel to, Programming Windows. But once I had all that experience, I was able to pick up Programming Windows again and bring it to its logical conclusion. It’s an epic story.

And I’m going to turn it into an eBook similar to the Windows 11 Field Guide this year. I can’t call it Programming Windows---that title is more correctly used by Charles Petzold and his incredible series of books---but I have some ideas about that. And it’s something I’ve already started working on...