darry wrote on 2020-07-29, 01:14:

I'm highly biased against type 1 compact cassettes . 😉

As a kid, I used cassetes mainly to play ZX Spectrum games so my player of choice used to be a cheap one (cheap cassettes were better for 8 bit computers). So it had no sense having good quality tapes to play through on low-grade speakers.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-07-29, 04:26:

Also, change logs on app updates that state "fixed the space time continuum" or something similarly "witty" instead of telling us what the hell they actually changed. Don't let your marketing department write this stuff, use actual engineers for that.

Well, in Nintendo's language "improve stability" is mentioned in EVERY firmware changelog and usually means "we're trying to stop hackers... again".

On other contexts, maybe it means "the bug was so embarrasing that we don't want to talk about it".

They do have a wikipedia page on musician's earplugs. Maybe I should have that down as a technological success.

I'm going to get really petty here.
Why do all our expansion cards have to be upside down?

With ISA they were upside right - back when most cases were horizontal and it didn't matter.

When PCI was introduced, they flipped the cards over so they could have 1 "shared" slot position, where 2 slots line up with the same case opening. Okay, fine.
By this time, tower cases were taking over.

A few years later AGP is introduced for graphics cards, but they kept them upside down.
This heralded the era of high powered cards that needed to dissipate a lot of heat. Would have worked better if they were facing up. Doing so would also point large coolers into an open area that would be pretty easy to officially reserve for their usage.

Several years after that, "PCI Express" is introduced, and they *still* didn't take the opportunity to reorient the cards.
So it's been what.. 27 years now? and the cards still haven't flipped back over. I guess it will never happen.

If my case is open, or I have a window.. I want to actually see the cards, not their back ends.
Like I said, petty. But it's been bothering me since my first PCI card that I thought was defective until I figured out it was actually supposed to go in that way.

I tried reinstalling Visual Studio 2019 and paying extra attention to the detailed settings. It didn't make much difference. I can do a console app or a desktop app (they are separate project types) in C++. But without MFC or directshow I don't see how to manipulate this very much. The old system command CreateDialog is still there. Also, you can start an empty C++ project which is potentially a good idea because for a video game or the like you don't really need the command prompt hanging around in the background. Without MFC, how do I define the dialog that I create? I found the Service Configuration Editor, which asks more questions than it answers.

Then again, maybe I'm expecting too much out of the free "community" version and I need the professional version to see this stuff. It's a shame.

The default desktop app has only a file menu to exit and an about menu that brings up a dialog box.

Canon makes the only high end camcorder still around on Amazon.

dnewhous wrote on 2020-07-30, 02:49:

Without MFC, how do I define the dialog that I create?

You don't actually need MFC to do any dialog editing. MFC is just a "easy mode" to raw WinAPI resources.

I basically followed this tutorial though it's quite a mouthful. You basically have to manually define everything, alot of which has to reside in the "resource" file that gets bound to the EXE during building.

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-07-30, 10:09:

dnewhous wrote on 2020-07-30, 02:49:

Without MFC, how do I define the dialog that I create?

You don't actually need MFC to do any dialog editing. MFC is just a "easy mode" to raw WinAPI resources.

I basically followed this tutorial though it's quite a mouthful. You basically have to manually define everything, alot of which has to reside in the "resource" file that gets bound to the EXE during building.

Thanks, but that's a console application.

dnewhous wrote on 2020-07-30, 12:02:

Thanks, but that's a console application.

... what? None of that tutorial even talks about console applications.

The "Getting started" section even explicitly states: Make sure you have specified a Win32 GUI (NOT "Console") project/makefile/target, whatever applies to your compiler.

Everything done in that tutorial outlines how to make your own dialogues, accelerators, menus, what have you. It's all written in a combination of both raw source code WinAPI calls and resource file scripts. The end result is never a console application, only a GUI application.

Are you trying to write drawing code to cmd.exe? The fact that the excercise says to compile in C and not C++ means the excercise is invalid. "Build solution" is how you compile and then "start debugging." That's true whether it is a console app or a desktop app. These commands are in the Visual C++ IDE itself. Every fresh project can be compiled and run.

More failings:

FedEx Office
Encyclopedia Americana

The win32 API (the basis for all GUI functions) is C code. MFC is just a toolkit that hides most of the busywork, similar to how the C++ standard library hides a lot of the low-level functions used in C.
There are plenty of non-MFC programs that have a GUI generated programmatically rather than relying on dialog resources.

Don't touch MFC or DirectShow, unless you want to go mad.

If you want to make a GUI or a console app, why not use .NET instead and have a much, MUCH easier time doing it ? (Core or Framework, it doesn't matter).

It's all available with VS Community. VS Community contains everything you need and more.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-07-30, 21:03:

Don't touch MFC or DirectShow, unless you want to go mad.

If you want to make a GUI or a console app, why not use .NET instead and have a much, MUCH easier time doing it ? (Core or Framework, it doesn't matter).

I guess you missed the part where the folks who were using MFC in the nineties (due to lack of alternatives) think that if they were forced to use it, and went mad, then everyone else should use it and go mad as well, and that actually good tools such as C# and .NET have no place in the programming world.

dr_st wrote on 2020-07-31, 08:16:

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-07-30, 21:03:

Don't touch MFC or DirectShow, unless you want to go mad.

If you want to make a GUI or a console app, why not use .NET instead and have a much, MUCH easier time doing it ? (Core or Framework, it doesn't matter).

I guess you missed the part where the folks who were using MFC in the nineties (due to lack of alternatives) think that if they were forced to use it, and went mad, then everyone else should use it and go mad as well, and that actually good tools such as C# and .NET have no place in the programming world.

Well if you see how bloated and slow .NET apps are you would understand. About as garbage as Java which also failed on the desktop.

Legacy .NET programs are close to impossible for me to try to run under Linux as well.

Why *exactly* was it necessary to come up with .NET in the first place...? What exactly was it "solving"? Why can't people just stick with something with portability like C (and to some lesser extent C++)?

Legacy DMA in pci slot?

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-07-31, 08:49:

Legacy .NET programs are close to impossible for me to try to run under Linux as well.

Why *exactly* was it necessary to come up with .NET in the first place...? What exactly was it "solving"? Why can't people just stick with something with portability like C (and to some lesser extent C++)?

DLL hell IIRC. End up being a replacement for PHP 🤣 and competitor to Java. If you want performant native apps C/C++ still the way to go.

I thought that .NET framework was so Visual C# and Visual Basic would share WPF in the framework, not the core. I understand Visual Basic came out of the desire to customize Office with VBA or something?

Visual C# has a lower entry price than Java, because without the SlickEdit plugin, I don't care for Eclipse.

I got Terbinafine prescribed. It's like Lamasil the pill. It will take a month to recover.

If we're talking about the high end, has anyone tried Corel XVL Studio for video game design?

And the reason for my concern about the lack of cassette tapes is for legacy collectors and for religious reasons. Has anyone ever heard of a tape recorded in Saint Michael's cathedral? Do you know what that means? Literally?

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-07-31, 08:49:

Why *exactly* was it necessary to come up with .NET in the first place...?

Because they've tried to "assimilate" Java. That means extending it with propietary extensions until:
a) any programmer was forced to use Microsoft products to ensure his code will work.
b) any user is forced to use Microsoft VM (and, more important, on Microsoft OSs) to ensure that applications will work.

Sun sued them and they were forced to not distribute their VM, so they had to develop their own, "universal", byte-code based language (note the heavy sarcasm on the "universal" part).

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-07-31, 08:49:

What exactly was it "solving"?

It reduces DLL hell, because every program seems to be linked to a given version of .NET DLLs (instead of a generic DLL only identified by a name) so if other program installs another version of the same DLL it will still work.

OTOH, you will end up with more and more runtimes and DLLs than any same person could think of.

And, of course, solves the problem of programmers that don't buy/rent new Microsoft products because older ones work fine and are supported on every system (another sarcasm included).

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-07-31, 08:49:

Why can't people just stick with something with portability like C (and to some lesser extent C++)?

Because managers needs their programmers use every new programming trend/methodology so they can sell their projects/products on the ground that new technologies are better (even if they're not suitable for that project).

The most similar thing to Java in C++ is wxwidgets. I don't know if they caught on. There's no layout editor and you invoke the GUI in the software instead of importing a resource (pre-defined dialogs).

kolderman wrote on 2020-07-31, 08:38:

Well if you see how bloated and slow .NET apps are you would understand. About as garbage as Java which also failed on the desktop.

Even disregarding the fact that bloat is not a real issue these days, and that not every application is CPU-bound, this is a very multifaceted question. Not every .NET program is bloated, not every C++ program is efficient, and poorly written C++ will frequently perform terrible, and will also suffer all the crap of an unmanaged environment, with memory leaks, arbitrary corruption and undefined behavior.

Different tasks call for different tools, and the tools themselves are evolving. C++ has gotten more manageable and easier to write, while .NET's (and Java's) performance also improved. There are still things for which it is almost certainly better to use one over the other, but the hardcore programmers from the 90s, who learned the trade back when performance was crucial and managed environments were truly horrible, still try to project these outdated realities of the past to the modern world.

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-07-31, 08:49:

Why *exactly* was it necessary to come up with .NET in the first place...? What exactly was it "solving"? Why can't people just stick with something with portability like C (and to some lesser extent C++)?

A managed environment with a less clunky, more flexible and much more user-friendly syntax than Java. This is C#. VB.NET was about giving the benefits of .NET to people who are used to Visual Basic (and not C/C++) syntax. Behind the scenes both compile to the same CLR.

If you don't understand the need for managed programming environments, and think everything should be C/C++, then you are hopelessly stuck in the past.

Honestly, I wish Ada had won the programming wars. It has lexigraphical functionality that only Perl has, and Windows needs for multiple languages. Like C# and C++ and Java, it works with C. It also might have meant that frankenbrowser Firefox, which is the prettiest and uses Perl and C++, may have performed well enough to be usable.

As to what graphical set you could use with Ada, anyone ever see Qt widgets? They didn't make it, but Microsoft bought them out.