> I do think the WinForms editor in Visual Studio C# was a pretty decent spiritual successor that came close to capturing the magic of a drag-and-drop GUI builder. Aesthetically lacking but highly functional.
It required the .Net Framework to be installed, which in the early 2000s (with far lower internet penetration and speeds) was a big enough problem. It wasn't particularly great either - Microsoft's attempts to port their own desktop products to .Net mostly failed. It was basically Java for the Windows Desktop, and never quite took off in the way VB apps did.
Today isn't the early 2000s, though. For example, every version of Windows shipped in the past ~20 years (starting with Vista) comes with .NET. And it is in fact very common for desktop apps on Windows today.
It would be more accurately described as a blend of Delphi and Java, the latter via J++. The overall object model is from Java, tweaked to merge the primitive types with their boxed wrappers (i.e. `int` vs `Integer`). C# strings and arrays were also almost a carbon copy of Java rather than anything Delphi-like, although it did add multidimensional arrays. From J++ it got delegates and events. From Delphi it got things like properties and explicit `virtual` on methods, but notably not e.g. overridable class (static) methods or named constructors. Also, Delphi had manual memory management, not GC.
> C# strings and arrays were also almost a carbon copy of Java
You'd be surprised but .NET and Java strings have a lot of differences. In Java, String is a class which wraps byte[], in .NET - string is a "FieldSeq" object with characters stored inline. One indirection less but with no special fields and cached state like in Java.
Arrays have significant differences too, where Java arrays do not implement any actual collection interfaces - they are just contiguous chunks of elements with an indexer and length field and need to be asList'ed, so it's common to consider in Java to rely on arrays an anti-pattern, which is the opposite to C# arrays, which implement the full set of System.Collections.Generic interfaces.
We're talking about the original .NET 1.x here, not the current state of affairs.
In any case, what I'm talking about is not so much implementation details as user-observable semantics. .NET strings are pretty much exactly like Java strings in that regard - it's an immutable reference type that is a sequence of UTF-16 codepoints. In contrast, strings in Delphi are mutable value types (implemented using copy-on-write with refcounting).
Similarly for arrays, while Delphi has Pascal-style fixed-size arrays that are value types, both C# and Java have arrays as a reference type with null as a distinct value from empty array. The other point of similarity is that both C# and Java treat arrays of objects as covariant, even though it's not actually typesafe (and triggers runtime exceptions if you try to put the wrong type into the array).
It required the .Net Framework to be installed, which in the early 2000s (with far lower internet penetration and speeds) was a big enough problem. It wasn't particularly great either - Microsoft's attempts to port their own desktop products to .Net mostly failed. It was basically Java for the Windows Desktop, and never quite took off in the way VB apps did.