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Closed 10 years ago.
Is it worth studying COM MFC ATL WTL now?
Everything is worth studying:
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it
You must understand the past to understand the present
Should you spend a majority of your time on it? Only if you expect that you will have to work with it. Otherwise, focus on the future.
Potentially yes for COM and ATL, if you're planning to program for Windows 7. All the new platform APIs coming out are COM-based: Direct 2d, Ribbon, Animation, Location & Sensors, Libraries, etc...
There will likely be .NET wrappers for some of these, but managed code is no longer the focus for the Windows team, at least for now and the near future.
The concepts of COM are really worth understanding. Especially the concept of interfaces, object creation strategies, proxies and Apartments.
Not really. If you want to make a COM object now, you could just use C++/.NET instead. If you want a UI, WinForms or WPF work fine.
Yes, you might get a job at Microsoft in their second most profitable business, Office, which is still based on COM. There are worse fates than that.
COM is totally worth it. The rest, not so much.
Only if you have to interface with some COM objects OR if you have to maintain some old COM/ATL code.
Same goes for MFC/WTL. Better and quicker UIs can be developed with latest .NET tools such as WPF and Winforms.
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
So after having read a few different Big Nerd Ranch texts, as well as seen Paul Haddad of Tweetbot fame more or less say that he doesn't use Interface Builder, I've come to the conclusion that for one reason or another, there's something wrong with it?
I personally find myself gravitating toward Interface Builder solely due to my background with Visual Basic. It's easier, it's faster, and just (for me) far more pleasant to work with.
In the end, though, my question is this: Is there some reason due to efficiency (either through performance of the final app or in the development process) that developers gravitate toward programmatically designed UI's over the Interface Builder-generated counterpart?
Thank you.
Interface Builder can be fiddly at times, and until recently you couldn't do anything remotely complex with it in terms of laying out UI elements relative to one another. Since you'd have to dip down to code to do that, many people just do everything in code.
However, with the advent of AutoLayout and its amazing integration with Interface Builder, that may change.
I personally feel that you can manage your code better by coding the UI yourself.
Interface builders can be used to build GUIs quickly, and allows you to experiment without having to know the intricate details of all the GUI components supported by your pl.
Best approach would be to mix these two approaches, build quickly using the interface builder, then move the code around as you like.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm new with Google Web Toolkit and i have some questions about the tool.
First of all, what i have to know to correctly program for GWT? It's ok if i use the GWT Designer to make the GUI?
Second, how i persists all the data i want to store? Use JPA/Hibernate + SQL Database? Or it's better to use AppEngine?
I'm with a great doubt how i get the data from Database to populate fields and tables on client-side.
and Last, i know a bit of Swing, so, GWT is the same? (Except Client - Server concept) ?
That's my questions. Well, thanks in advance.
First of all, what i have to know to correctly program for GWT? It's ok if i use the GWT Designer to make the GUI?
Ok.
Second, how i persists all the data i want to store? Use JPA/Hibernate + SQL Database? Or it's better to use AppEngine?
It's your choice. AppEngine has it's limitations. For example, it scales but may not be the best choice for multi-player games if you need data updated very often and quickly. It really depends on your need/design.
If you do go with AppEngine, my experience with JPA was a headache. Objectify is much easier and the way I would go.
Last, i know a bit of Swing, so, GWT is the same? (Except Client - Server concept) ?
I guess they share the concept of using listeners/handlers for events. They are not the same though.
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Closed 10 years ago.
MonoTouch is great for cross-platform app development. This makes a very strong business argument and I am on verge of developing using MonoTouch with prospects of branching into Android and WinMo. Before starting commercial development in MonoTouch I want to ask one last question, just in case I've missed something critical in my research so far:
What do you think is the biggest drawback of MonoTouch as compared to Objective C?
Barring games development, use whatever context comes to your mind.
Thanks
Steph
UPDATE: Following link probably best answers the question: http://docs.xamarin.com/ios/about/limitations. Conflict of interest is that it comes from Xamarin. Thanks to everyone who contributed!
In my opinion MonoTouch is just great, if you are an c#-developer. You can use almost everything from the full .net-framework and it works like a charm.
Your app gets a bit bigger in a meaning of filesize and you are at the mercy of Xamarin. The only real drawback I have found until now is that you have to change a lot between xcode and monodevelop IF you use the interface-builder. As I don't use the IB that wasn't a big dealbreaker for me (I don't use the visual studio designer either...)
If you know c# and would have to learn Objective-C -> go for MonoTouch!
If you don't know both, it might be a good choice to learn the "real way" to code native apps. Btw. you need some knowledge of Objective-C or iOS-development in general. So you know how to use Views and ViewControllers, what's the names of the methods and so on.
UPDATE: To answer your questions in the comment. The farest I have gone by now, was kinda migrating an existing opensource Objective-C-GUI-Library (kind of popoverControl) to an MonoTouch project. That was rather straightforward and easy. Direct using of Objective-C-Libraries wasn't in my needs by now. But you can read about it in the Xamarin-Docs.
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Closed 10 years ago.
limesurvey is good enough and it is open-source, but why are wufoo-like services so popular nowadays?
Wufoo has a much more fancy user interface than limesurvey but why does limesurvey not make some improvements(2.0??)?
For business solution, which will be preferred in general case?
For one, I think the fact that the UI is so slick is one of the BIG reasons why services like Wufoo are indeed so popular. The target audience of these services is generally non-developer types who use mostly point-and-click interfaces and are very visual with their work, so a clean, well-organized UI that lends itself to ease of use will always win out.
After briefly testing both Wufoo and LimeSurvey, the difference in usage of drag-and-drop (Wufoo) vs. traditional text box and dropdown (Limesurvey) is readily apparent. While I felt overwhelmed at the start of both services, I did feel that Wufoo at least had some hints on which direction to go next if I was stuck, and never had a ton of controls on the page for me to see. It actually felt like a WYSIWYG editor for forms/surveys.
LimeSurvey on the other hand does not feel like it has any flow, and it's incredibly easy to get a bunch of toolbars on-screen that further confuse me. I can't speak to how comparable it is to Wufoo, or how powerful it is, but I have a feeling that while it can probably match what Wufoo can produce in terms of surveys, it probably requires much more expertise on my part.
But these are just my observations as a developer who has just recently heard of and tried both services.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Can someone recommend some good VB.net code generation tools?
I only need a tool for developing desktop applications. So the web side of things doesn't really concern me too much.
CodeSmith Generator has a bunch of Visual Basic Templates.
The de-facto standard for code generation (especially for .NET languages) seems to be CodeSmith. The latest version will cost money, however, they have made an older version freeware.
If you'd like to go with something free and open-source, MyGeneration is also quite good, and can actally use (after some conversion) CodeSmith templates.
The Microsoft copy of CodeSmith is T4, built into VS 2005 & 2008.
I only know of a couple of products that are not free:
There is CodeRush from DevExpress:
http://devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/Coding_Assistance/
Miguel Castro has one called CodeBreeze:
http://www.steelbluesolutions.com/Summary/CodeBreeze/Default.aspx
CodeSmith has a ton of templates and supports the latest technologies. It does cost money but it is well worth it in the time you will save as well as the support that comes with it. If you are using Linq to SQL, check out our PLINQO templates. There is currently a sweet CodeSmith offer on plinqo.com
Thanks
-Blake Niemyjski