Re: [Dev-C++] Offtopic: Advice on GUI to learn

[Michael C U. <mu...@cb...>]

Well, like I said, the Win32 API will eventually go away. But it's going
to go away for a long time because Microsoft can't afford to break all of
the legacy applications that are out there.

As far as Longhorn, the latest word is that we won't see it until 2006, or
maybe even 2007. So the Win32 API is going to be the main API for Windows
for at least a few more years.

But if you want to write WinFX apps, like I said, .NET is a subset of
WinFX. According to Microsoft, "the best way for your apps to be ready for
Longhorn and WinFX, and the best way for you as a programmmer to be ready
for WinFX, is to write .NET apps today."

So what you can do if you want to learn WinFX is download the .NET SDK
from Microsoft. And then after you have played with it a bit, you can see
for yourself (as I did), how much it sucks and how bad its performance is,
and then you can switch to Java.

Mike

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Daniel Glenfield wrote:

> Personally I'm at a bit of a quandary (thanks Dictionary.com) as I'm sure
> many new Windows programmers are. Do we work hard to learn the old APIs or
> do we hold off for the WinFX api?
>
> Does anyone know of a good site with WinFX information? Yes I could google
> it but there's no guarantee I will find the best site. Google isn't a real
> world programmer.
>
>
>
>
> >From: Michael C Urban <mu...@cb...>
> >To: Daniel Glenfield <sp...@ho...>
> >CC: go...@de..., dev...@li...
> >Subject: Re: [Dev-C++] Offtopic: Advice on GUI to learn
> >Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 03:07:23 -0600 (CST)
> >
> >On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Daniel Glenfield wrote:
> >
> > > You can create a window in 5 lines, but won't that be very high level?
> >With
> > > the windows API you have other things to set up. Or is there a more
> >detailed
> > > version that takes 30 lines of code?
> >
> >With the Windows API, you have to set up a lot of things manually that the
> >toolkit's class will set up for you automatically. Example, if you want to
> >load an image in a window and be able to scroll that image, the toolkit
> >has a class that will automatically set up the scrollbars for you. With
> >the Windows API, the scrollbars have to be manually programmed to
> >determine how far their range should be, how far it should move with each
> >click, how far it should move the image with each click, where the image
> >ends so that it doesn't scroll past the end, etc. You also have to
> >manually program the scrollbar movement and set its position. And that
> >won't even give you the ability to use the arrow keys, the page up/page
> >down keys, or the scroll wheel. If you want those, it's more manual
> >programming. The result is that it can literally take 80 or 90 lines of
> >code just to get a decent scrollbar using the Windows API. Using a high
> >level toolkit, you can probably do it in less than 10. In Java Swing, I
> >just did it with 3 lines of code. Literally, it took me 3 lines of code to
> >do what takes about 90 lines of code to do using the Windows API.
> >
> >So yes, you are working at a much higher level with a toolkit. But
> >generally, that is a good thing. It lets you concentrate on what you want
> >to do (display a scrollable image), rather than how to do what you want to
> >do (implement a bunch of math formulas and such to determine how far the
> >image should scroll with each mouse click on a scroll arrow, how far the
> >scrollbar should move in response, etc.)
> >
> >Mike
> >
>
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