Yeah, but those layout managers came later. I don’t think they were there in the early 2000s.
I’ll say this for Microsoft: they supported WinForms, even adding new features, long after it had ceased to be the new hotness. Whether they still do, I don’t know. The last time I touched WinForms was 2013.
Where I was working, for maximum compatibility with customers, I was still working on .NET 1.1 until I want to say 2006/7, when we moved to .NET 2.0. EDIT: it was actually 2006 because the project I was leading integrated with SQL Server Managment Studio, which forced us to use .NET 2.0. We were one of the first two projects to make the jump.
I don't think we moved to anything WPF capable until .NET 4 came out in 2010 or so, except for perhaps one project that had moved to .NET 3.5 so they could take advantage of an early version of ASP.NET MVC.
Believe it or not, when I showed up in 2004, we were still running on .NET 1.0 and Visual Studio 2002, which did not support extensions, so no Resharper... which was a nightmare given I'd just been using IntelliJ IDEA. Moving to VS2002 was an absolutely horrible regression.
So I want to say I'd managed to argue the case for .NET 1.1 and VS2003 by the end of 2004, or maybe very early 2005... which meant us devs could at least install ReSharper and have a much better time as a result.
I’ll say this for Microsoft: they supported WinForms, even adding new features, long after it had ceased to be the new hotness. Whether they still do, I don’t know. The last time I touched WinForms was 2013.