Re: to Rob (perhaps I'm a little bored, but...)
Ralf writes:
> Yes, we do have win32 support, we can call
> DLL's .. but it seems its gonna be up to David Cuny to determine
> of the whole Win32 platform has any point at all... it doesnt
> do much usefull on itself.
> And things have to be *practicle* .. if you dont have a visual
> resource manager with your win32 platform, its not considered to
> support win32.. and I must agree to that.
Certainly there's a lot we can do to improve the support for
the WIN32 platform, and I thank David for what he has done so far.
But I really think David has *already* accomplished something that
the fancy-pants all-singing all-dancing GUI IDE Visual
programming packages have failed at:
he's made it really simple for a non-professional
to write a simple Windows GUI program.
When I first sat down a couple of years ago to make
a very simple WIN32 program using Visual C++, I had
an unbelievably frustrating time trying to learn the system.
Sure, you can design your GUI elements visually on the screen.
That's great. But that's where the fun ends. For your trivial program
the system generates thousands of lines of incomprehensible
C++ code referencing all sorts of C++ classes that you know
nothing about. You are supposed to fit your code into their code
without really understanding how their code works. If you make
a mistake you get a machine exception - no explanation.
There are so many options, menus, buttons to push, help text to read
etc. that you get lost in it all. I had some assistance from another
programmer who had been through it before. That helped a lot,
but I never really got the hang of it, even after many full-days
of frustration. I eventually got my program to work, but I didn't
feel good about it, because I still didn't really understand it.
And don't forget, once you get the GUI working, you still have
to code/compile/link in C++ (1000 page manual)
- with the usual machine exceptions, malloc/free problems, copying
a string that's one byte too long, forgetting the 0-terminator etc.etc.
More recently, Junko tried to learn WATCOM's Visual C++
environment, which is somewhat simpler. She had pretty
much the same experience as me. I think if you use these
packages every day as part of your job, you will eventually
become competent with them. Casual users or hobbyists
should beware!
I've never actually programmed in Visual Basic but I did
skim through a manual several times (again, 1000 pages).
Ralf, don't you have Visual Basic? If it's so good, why
aren't you using it?
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://members.aol.com/FilesEu/
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