Re: Newbie to PPC/eVC

From: Mike Welch (michaelw_at_techemail.com)
Date: 02/24/04 

Date: 24 Feb 2004 04:34:37 -0800

Yeah, it's definitely not as visual...I spent some time working with
my form because what I designed wasn't what turned out, even on the
emulator. But, there are some improvements over the last time I
checked it out. At least now I double click a button and it takes me
to code. As I recall, it didn't do this in the 2000 version. I didn't
even know how to create a hello world app...talk about a blow! :)

What I like, of course, is the small EXE. I've always been a purist
about that...comes from the days when we used to spend hours
optimizing code to pull a few opcodes out of a loop. There's a skill
that's all but useless these days. Today we just layer more layers on
top of the layers :)

Yeah, what I've done would have taken no more than an hour in Delphi,
and that's tested. But it's actually doing real stuff, so I'm liking
that.

What's this afx stuff? And what the heck is a _T()? The afx stuff
seems to be some pretty high level wrappers for common functions. I
stumbled across a message box that's a breeze to use.

Oh, and I overloaded a class method...too easy. Syntax wise, I was
looking for what I must be doing wrong because it was so easy.

I don't know .NET yet, but was talking to a friend just last night who
is learning it and he said one of the gripes he has is, unlike Delphi,
it's all just implementation, there's no interface. I told him that,
if it's like eVC, there's an interface somewhere, that unlike Delphi
they just put that in a different file (a .h) where Delphi has it in
the same unit. That one bit me already.

OH, and the biggest DUUHH so far has been forgetting that = and == are
different. I spent well over an HOUR trying to figure out why
something like this didn't work:

if (a = b) {
  ::ShootMe();
}

Beeee-lush! :)

mw

"Darren Beckley" <darren.beckley@nointermecspam.com> wrote in message news:<upJe8Wm#DHA.688@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl>...
> Glad it's beginning to make sense! My first few years of GUI programming on
> Windows (on the desktop) was with VB, so I too struggled when I first tried
> to write GUI apps with VC++. At least I had several years experience with
> C/C++ on Unix boxes to cushion the blow a little. A colleague of mine had
> exactly your experience - moving from Delphi on desktop to eVC++ on
> handhelds - and he also found it pretty heavy going. One thing to bear in
> mind is that VC++ or eVC++ are not quite as "visual" as you might expect, so
> you'll have to get used to fiddling with GUI stuff via code.
>
> Good luck!
> Darren
>