The Petzold books that I own are "Programming Windows" (versions for 3.0, 95, and 98), "Programming Windows with C#" and the update "Programming Windows Forms" and "Applications = Code + Markup", which is about Windows Presentation Foundation. I stopped reading this last book when I realized the the "SpinBox" control was not included in WPF. I don't think Petzold used a form designer (Or "AppWizard") to produce any of examples in any of these books except possibly the last one, which I didn't finish.
In my case, I am constructing a chessboard using an 8x8 array of Rich Text boxes, all sharing the same event handler. I have already written this program in C#, but now I need it in Pascal, to merge with the old Turbo Games chess program. I think it would take me longer to learn how create a two-dimensional array of text boxes in the form designer than it will take to write the code directly. Why am I using Rich Text boxes to make the squares on the board? Because is reduces the amount of keyboard handling code that I have to write.