Re: EU Designer - request and suggestion
- Posted by Brian Jackson <bjackson at 2FARGON.COM> Mar 12, 2000
- 379 views
On Sat, 11 Mar 2000 15:31:47 -0500, SR Williamson <sr.williamson at OSHA.GOV> wrote: >Brian, >I love EU Designer, but I have a couple of simple ideas. Hopefully, they're >not also simple-minded. > >First, it would be really, really, really helpful if you would have a button > or something so that you could add code outside of the controls. What I >would like to see specifically is a button/menu that calls up the code >editor, and allows you to type in all the code you want to go in after >win32lib.ew and before the constant declaration for the main form. I use >this area to add additional include files, and I'd love to be able to do >this from within EUD. It also seems fairly trivial. I've had a couple of requests to do this. At this time it is still a little outside of the scope of EuDesigner. I would definitely like to do something like this, but when I do, I want to do it properly, which means creating modularized source code. You'll notice that in the source code for EuD, I've broken out lots of things into include files (such as constant declarations, Win32Lib objects, etc.) One of the caveats I've run into is that I find an occasional need to use call_proc()/call_func() in order to get everything to work correctly. So I guess the bottom line is that yes, it is easy to do, but there are other things that need to be put into place before this can happen. >Related to that, I personally would like to see the window constant >declaration with its assorted controls saved to a separate file, and then >added to the main program by use of an include. I have a few reasons to >believe this is a better way to do it. Here they are, and please correct me >if I'm not thinking clearly: >1) It treats the window and controls more like resources for the program. >That way if you want to change just the window and controls, you can include >a different file, and not have to copy your program logic. >2) Similarly, if you want to re-use your main window and controls in several >different projects, it becomes a matter of just adding them as includes to >the main program. >3) It seems like it would make it easier to add a button/something to EUD to >allow use of controls/windows previously created in EUD to different >projects, which seems desirable to me. >4) It makes the program more modularized. > I agree for the reasons you stated, and as you'll notice, I did the same thing by hand when I started coding EuD. But, for the same reasons as above, I'm not yet ready to start modularizing the whole process yet. >I know EUD isn't a true IDE - yet - and maybe these couple changes are >outside the scope of what you're wanting to do, but I think there might be >some merit to them. If anyone disagrees (or agrees), I'd love to know why. >Sherm I do like your suggestions, and my overall goal is to someday provide a full fledged IDE that has a project manager and all that bully stuff. But for now, I'm still trying to figure out how to make the controls respond properly, and make some of the controls (groupbox) work at all. Add to that all the attributes I haven't even thought about yet (tooltips and font, for example), and I'll have my hands full for awhile yet. Brian