Re: Need to downgrade to C++6?
- From: Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:14:21 GMT
In article news:<lhM1h.18526$TV3.9665@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David Ching
wrote:
For MFC development VC6 is the "older and better" version.
But the MFC libraries in VC2003 or 2005 are so much better than in VC6.
CStringA/W, replacements for USES_CONVERSION, additional classes like
CImage, a revamped CPropertySheet, etc. are all improvements I'm finding
harder and harder to live without. Even with a worse IDE, these classes
make programming MFC apps more efficient overall.
Yes, I grant you there are library improvements. Nothing that's essential,
IMV, and very little that can't be done nearly as well in other ways.
The crap IDE in VS2005 is a real killer.
For example, I had to change a static string in a dialog template in the
resource editor the other day (in a Win32 SDK project, as it happens, so this
isn't even a question of MFC support being lacking -- it's more fundamental
still). In the property editor in VS2005 the window for editing the value in a
static edit control is limited, as all the other editors are, to the width of
the property editor. In VC6 there's a very sensible property dialog that
allows more space for editing the string than for (for example) setting
boolean properties. That's entirely reasonable because the string needs more
space and the bools don't. Trying to fit all properties into a column is the
sort of one-size-fits-all approach that NEVER works, ad this is a fine example
of it not working.
I'm not saying that VC6 IDE couldn't be improved on (that properties dialog
should be resizable, for one thing), just that you don't improve on something
by making it less usable.
In addition, even though the VC6 IDE has a better feature set, ...
It does ... and it's tragic that MS didn't make the new features available
without removing a lot of the usability of the old IDE.
And the 3rd party plug-in support is much, much better for VC2005.
That may be so, but have seen very few plug-ins (for either IDE) that I'd go
to the trouble of installing.
The Refactor! plug-in (attempts to) brings the major refactorings in C#
to C++, but it doesn't work the great for me.
AIUI it works OK for C#, but not for C++. If it worked well in C++ I might see
that as a reason to switch from VC6 for all my C++ work (I *do* use VS2005,
just not by choice for MFC).
If nothing else, developing for Vista will probably mean upgrading to
VC2005. The Vista SDK is not guaranteed to work with anything other than
VC2005 or later, neither is the debugging aspects of the older IDE's
guaranteed to work.
Yes, I'm running VS2005 under Vista RC2. I really ought to try VC6, sometime,
(I have clients who ask me, from time to time, whether Vista will mean that
they have to upgrade to VS2005 and it's about time I stopped saying "I don't
know").
Cheers,
Daniel.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Need to downgrade to C++6?
- From: David Ching
- Re: Need to downgrade to C++6?
- References:
- Re: Need to downgrade to C++6?
- From: David Ching
- Re: Need to downgrade to C++6?
- Prev by Date: Re: SendMessage vs function call
- Next by Date: Thread using GetSystemTime() problem
- Previous by thread: Re: Need to downgrade to C++6?
- Next by thread: Re: Need to downgrade to C++6?
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
