Re: Is VS2008 a good environment?

On Mar 2, 6:29 pm, me4dtrade <me4dtr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
First I admit that I am pretty new to VS, even though I have many
years' experience in other languages and environments.

Upon programming VS2008 using win32 and C++, I find that it is not
straight forward to do lots of things. And most of the problems are
pretty basic.

For instance, if you want a nearly complete OOP, you need to create
your own AppWin class that is used as a container of everything. You
can include all other classes in it and do everything. That is, AppWin
is a factory that includes all mathinary and tools and workers to
produce certain products. But there are problems.

For instance, the default WindowProc which processes messages has to
be defined STATIC, which makes everything difficult because you can
not use non-static (instance) members in the function. You have to
tweak it and turn it into a non-static function. Why? Why M$ doesn't
do this for our programmers automatically? Pretty stupid M$. And it is
against OOP logic.

The other thing is that implementing thread to a member function is
not straight forward, either. And again you have to tweak it to make
it to be able to use non-static members.

Every windows app needs to process messages, nearly every windows app
needs to have their threads, and non of these are straight forward in
VS. Isn't it stupid?

If you'd actually paid for Visual Studio instead of downloading and
mocking the Express version, you would have gotten a free copy of MFC
to go with it. Which takes care of the "Make Windows programming OOP"
for you. Alternatively, you could have downloaded the GPL version of
Qt and worked with that; I hear it's very good, and was going to try
it at home before I wound up replacing Vista on my laptop with
Ubuntu. There's also the Win32 port of GTK, but that's been broken
for a while, and they seem uninterested in fixing things like
printing.

You're also welcome to download mingw, loading up TextPad or jEdit
(both very fine text editors), and see if that makes your development
process any easier. Sure, you're not going to get an integrated
debugger without a plugin, but who needs that? (Does jEdit have a
plugin for debugging? Seems kinda scary to attach to a process from a
JVM.) There's also Eclipse, which is a very fine IDE if you can get
it set up. (I couldn't under Windows, but the Ubuntu packages worked
well.)

It sounds to me like you're asking a free IDE to abstract away the
vast majority of Win32 programming. Honestly, VS2008 does that. In
the span of three minutes, I can create a quick dialog-based app that
would allow me to enter some text into a text box, click a button, and
have a message box appear with my text as its body. Dig into the
source code behind it, and you'll find it's well-structured, readable
and with comments already added in parts you might be interested in.
And it's all in native code, written in object-oriented C++. From my
app's CWinApp-derived core app class to CDialog-derived window.

Three minutes. And most of that's spent with the drag-and-drop
WYSIWYG dialog editor.

I'm a hard-core Linux junkie, and have been since 1999; Ask me what
program you can use to do something, and I'm more likely to know how
to do it under Linux, as I've probably done and can give you a list of
free software choices and maybe few pointers and warnings about
pitfalls.

But if there's one piece of software Microsoft wrote that's better
than anything else in its industry, it's the Visual Studio IDE. Why
do I feel this way? Win32 coding is my day job, and I can write good
native-code C++ apps much much faster on Windows with Visual Studio
than I can with any IDE available under Linux.
.