[kjellsbells]

imho: because Microsoft fabulously, utterly dropped the ball. I suspect a combination of well-meaning intentions, Microsoft inanity, and their infamous internal politics helped.

- VB apps weren't great from the point of view of internationalization, accessibility. Nor were they easy to adapt to multiple screen sizes. Hard to retrofit the ecosystem to make that right it seemed.

- Microsoft decided to solve that problem by attacking a different one (symptomatic of their internal politics), by pushing .Net. That smelled to me of the victors of an internal battle (VB vs .Net) taking over the real estate of the VB ecosystem. However, the developers of VB apps got a vote, and they bailed.

Microsoft's timing was also not great in that the web and mobile revolution arrived just as they were wrangling with all this and made a lot of the discussion irrelevant. No one starting a new app today is going to reach for VB.Net, they're going to default to a web app. If desktop perf is the target, they'll grit their teeth and try to figure out what desktop tookit (WinForms, XAML, MAUI etc) they should be using...yet more friction compared to webapps.

It's a tragedy that scratch-your-own-itch desktop apps went away, but I can't say I am at all surprised.