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Closed 11 years ago.
I heard here a lot that MFC is outdated, and wraps Win32 in bad OOP.
But Microsoft released MFC 10 with VS2010, and it has latest tools like ribbon interface, so should one use it for simple apps?
MFC is widely considered to be poorly designed but it has been updated recently and appears to be alive and well. You may decide not to use it for other reasons, but you should not reject it for being outdated.
MFC doesn't look bad if you understand it. Otherwise you consider it as poorly designed.
MFC is not outdated: a lot of complex applications use MFC, for example MS Office. And you even can find in samples how to make office-look application.
Also for simple apps you can use ATL.
I have seen MFC applications are noticeably faster, particularly they load faster compared to C#. The compelling arguments I have heard from C# guys are it is very fast to development in compared to MFC. In terms of performance MFC wins hands down.
You can make a call on what kind of application you are developing and what features do you need. The trend unfortunately is moving away from MFC though I personally can't justify it. I know couple of companies who are planning to migrate MFC applications to .NET My friends there old me mainly it's the faster development time and it is easy to develop in.
If you are bold you can still start new application with MFC and do better than those who would with C#. If you just want to go with trend than use new easier tools and take a little hit with performance.
Overall I would definitely not sideline MFC as it might be the only fit for certain high performance applications. For example I love the GUI threads in MFC which don't exist in C++ but are very powerful if used properly. I don't know if they exist in C# or newer languages but I wouldn't like to give up on them.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm looking for an efficient, easy-to-learn tool for Scrum project management not for proffesional use but to use it in my thesis concerning the use of Scrum in game development. Basically I want to visualize a production process of a hypothetical game. Some fragments of the production process should be really detailed to make my point, so basically user stories, tasks, burndown charts etc. are a must.
I'm using Scrum, Kanban and some Lean practices for eliminating waste. I also want to use Extreme Programming practices in this production process including TDD and Continuous Integration.
I have zero experience in proffesional project management so I need something that's fairly simple to use for a newb like me.
Anyone can recommend a tool like that? For now I was thinking about TargetProcess and ScrumWorks. Thanks.
Whiteboards and Post-Its.
No... Seriously.
:-)
Throw in Excel for your charting. This combination is drop dead easy to keep up to date and use.
Brandon
I would recommend these I am familiar with, in this order:
If you are collocated, use whiteboard and Post-its and Excel charting as in the answer above.
If you are not, you may opt for Trello, which is basically... a whiteboard with post-its. No charting though.
Or Pivotal Tracker, which is aimed specifically to Scrum project management (building some functionality for Kanban, too). It does all the story-points-and-velocity calculations for you and some charting. Somtimes it's too "prescriptive". You don't do Scrum by the book, you might have some difficulties to overcome the built-in lifecycle.
Both are very intuitive and easy-to-use. Trello is free, Pivotal Tracker is free for individual use only. The bigger your team of collaborator the higher the monthly subscription.
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Closed 9 years ago.
Depends on your experience what are best free installation tools available for windows deployment for both managed and unmanaged deployment ?
Visual studio setup project only works for simple deployment scenario's and it doesnt allow too much customization.
WiX is your best bet if you want to build MSI packages. It can be customized to various degrees, from simple modifications to the dialogs to full control over every step of the setup process, it integrates fully with Visual Studio, and it's free and open source.
Be wary that, although the documentation is good and the learning curve (in my opinion) is pretty fast for simple projects, full-fledged personalization requires a moderate to deep understanding of the inner workings of Windows Installer. The excellent WiX Tutorial should, however, give you an idea of the possibilities offered by this tool (as well as sample code) without going into too much detail. (Of course, if you want to have an extremely fine-grade control over the setup program, you'll have to resort to MSDN in the end).
Another bonus is that the latest version of WiX offers an integrated bootstrapper as well, so, if you need - for example - to install or upgrade the .NET Framework on the user's machine, you can do it using this single tool (minimal examples are provided in the WiX documentation).
Please have a look at
InnoSetup
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am curious about this. I must learn Prolog for my course, but the applications that I seen mostly are written using C++, C# or Java. Applications written by Prolog, to me is very very rare application.
So, I wonder how Prolog is used and implement the real-world application?
SWI-Prolog website is served from... SWI-prolog, using just a small subset of the libraries available.
Well, it's not a commercial application, but it's rather real world.
Much effort was required to make the runtime able to perform 24x7 service (mainly garbage collection) and required performance scalability (among other multithreading).
Several libraries were developed driven by real world applications needs.
I once asked my supervisor a similar question, when he is giving us a Prological lecture.
And he told me that people do not really use prolog to implement a whole huge system. Instead, people write the main part with other language(which is more sane and trivial), and link it to a "decision procedure" or something written in Prolog.
Not sure about other Prolog implementation, we were using BProlog and it provides C/Java interface.
Microsoft Windows NT Networking Installation and Configuration applet
One of the notorious and in a way notable examples is Microsoft Windows NT OS network interface configuration code that involved a Small Prolog interpreter built in. Here is a link to the story written by David Hovel for Dr. Dobbs. (The often cited Microsoft Research link seems to be gone.)
Expert systems
Once Prolog was considered as THE language for a class of software systems called Expert Systems. These were interactive knowledge management systems often with a relational database backend.
Beyond Prolog
In general rule-based programming, resolution and different automated reasoning systems are widely used beyond Prolog.
According to the Tiobe Software Index, Prolog is currently #36: between Haskell and FoxPro:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
What's it used for?
I first heard of it with respect to Japan's (now defunct) "Fifth Generation" project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
Frankly, I'm not really aware of anybody using Prolog for any serious commercial development.
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Closed 9 years ago.
Any cheap or free IDE's out there for VB6 programming? or is MS the only way to go?
Thanks.
VB6 is a Microsoft language and product, so they have the VB6 thing sewed up.
If you need the VB6 compiler, there's no alternative to the real Microsoft product. You can run it in command-line mode so I guess you could use any IDE.
If you have an MSDN subscription, you can download Visual Basic 6 free.
Otherwise try somewhere like eBay, although it's often surprisingly expensive. Although Microsoft said in September 09 there were still several million people using VB6, so maybe it's not that surprising.
Not that I know of for VB6.
VB .NET has Visual Basic Express Edition, though...
I don't know of a complete IDE, but MZ-Tools makes a great IDE addin for VBA/VB6 (and it's free).
Have you tried ebay? You may be able to pick up a genuine copy of VB6 for not a lot of money.
Not for VB6 (another answer mentions a .NET solution).
There used to be a Visual Basic 5 Control Creation Edition (CCE) that was freely redistributable, but my feeble attempts at searching have failed to find it; a non-Microsoft site purporting to have it has removed it and replaced it with a text file complaining of link abuse, and Microsoft themselves don't distribute it anymore, sadly.
The CCE can't be used to make executables, as hinted at by its name.
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Closed 9 years ago.
Where can I find resources related to the design and development of text-based user interfaces (e.g. interfaces exported via serial port from embedded devices to VT100 terminals)? I am interested in any material available - best practices, style guides, frameworks, etc.
Note that I am asking about resources related to the design and development of 'TUIs' rather than command-line interfaces (the thrust of Text User Interface Design Reference?). Wikipedia differentiates TUIs from CLIs (and GUIs) as follows:
TUIs are different from command-line
interfaces in that, like GUIs, they
use the entire screen area and do not
necessarily provide line-by-line
output. However, TUIs only use text
and symbols available on a typical
text terminal, while GUIs typically
use high-resolution graphics modes.
I don't have any experience with VT100 and that kind of stuff, but I know that Turbo Vision is still around and kicking on quite a few platforms, DOS and Linux included. And back in its day, it was used to write some of the better TUI applications (Borland C++ and Borland Pascal DOS IDEs come to mind), and I've seen it used in LOB applications back then quite often as well.
Screenshot:
(source: sourceforge.net)
Perhaps take a look at ncurses? It's a GNU library specifically designed for writing terminal-based UIs.
For best practices and style guides, the IBM Common User Access (CUA) defines a "text subset" that should be helpful especially if your users are used to GUIs. Details are in Chapter 3 of:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/F29BDG00/CCONTENTS
Additional CUA guidelines and standards are in:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/F29AL000/CCONTENTS?DT=19921204095534
http://petesqbsite.com/sections/express/issue21/tuiseriespart1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
Hope it helps... I still make programs in TUI (www.harbour-project.org)