creating iSeries like programs.

Answer 1

There are a couple of webifiers or screen scraping programs for iSeries that will create a web or windows user interface on top of your iSeries application. I have never used any of those so there is not a particular one that I can recommend, but you might want to look their for inspiration or reuse.

Answer 2

I've used iSeries extensively and I remember exactly what you're talking about. To simulate this look and feel in a C# app, you'll want to create a console project and write text to different areas of the screen with the help of the Console.CursorTop and Console.CursorLeft properties, then calling Console.Write or Console.WriteLine to write out the text in the previously set position. To change colors, before calling WriteLine you'll want to use the Console.ForegroundColor and Console.BackgroundColor properties.

You'll need to listen for input and upon finding a tab character, your program can use its own internal logic to determine where the cursor should appear next (on the next line in the same column, for instance, to simulate those left columns of input fields in your screenshot).

Doing this with a Windows Forms app will be a little trickier and you'd definitely want to write your own control for it (possibly sub-classed from one of the many types of standard multi-line text controls already available).

Answer 3

It's a good question. For many Use Cases the standard Windows (or other windowing) paradigm can be overkill, intimidating, and confusing.

Back in DOS days there were a number of "Windowing" libraries that created various abstractions for doing this.

[After Googling]

Here's a site that lists various libraries including a several that appear to be of interest.

A resource like this would also be handy for Mobile apps, where mouse-driven window apps tend to be not the best fit, especially for workflow-type processes. The Console is a pretty universal lowest-common-denominator abstraction available in most every environment.

Answer 4

You are looking for a curses like library but for windows. And usable from VB & C#.

Curses provides for a even richer text based UI than even iSeries. All sorts of widgetry!
Windows is not really supportive of text interfaces whether on purpose or not so are out of luck.
But ...
Well, how about MonoCurses? I don't know if it will work though. Also look at PDCurses. And if you don't mind using Python for just the front-end see this.