Updating Old Apps? WZCK, Pie Slicer, et al.

[Rman Virgil]

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@Goth: Neat. Qt looks like fun to work with.

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[Goth Zagog-Thou]

It's not bad, once you get used to how Designer does things compared to, say, VS 2010.

[Stratadrake]

And here I been thinking the original ref to a date with a fox was about a babe encounter.

Yes, that implication was deliberate on my part.

I can say I've never even heard of Qt before, but if it's basically the C equivalent to VB's IDE then that is several steps up from bare code editing, blind compiling and black-box debugging, which are difficult things to get used to. For example, the PCX crash that old versions of Pie Slicer suffered from took forever to figure out why. Seriously, if your IDE crashes th

That screenshot is awesome for 20 minutes' work or so, but I probably don't need to tell you that that duplicating all of the UI behavior (even without the internal data structures) is not so easy a task.

[Lord Apocalypse]

Qt is easier to use and learn than Visual C++. You still ahve to learn C/C++ but it is a lot easier to wing it in Qt than VC. Just using the examples/tutorials you can put together an application just by cut n paste. The tutorials are even easy to follow and learn from.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I believe that the cross-platform tools (QT Creator and Mono Develop) offer the same or even slightly more useful debugging output compared to Visual Studio. That's my opinion, of course.

And you're definitely not flying blind on the 'nix tools, as you can see.

[Rman Virgil]

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Honestly, the only thing I knew about Qt was the Nokia connection.
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[Stratadrake]

For now I would like to continue working in VB until I can get the build actually functioning. VB.Net language constructs (and, so I hear, actual performance) are apparently closer to C than VB6 was

Apparently it's easy enough to grab a Graphics surface for a control and start drawing on it with GDI+ methods, the hitch is not having some of the old DrawMode blendings (like bitwise AND and OR blending - which PieSlicer made extensive use of - can't seem to find 'em) which is kinda bummer. And converting my popup menus from the Menu class to the ContexMenu class was a pain in the ... it required diving into the .designer.vb files, which is the auto-generated source code that the UI designer itself uses to display your form's Design view. As in, make one mistake and VB can't display the form in the WYSIWYG editor. One of the errors I got was specifically "please do not make changes to Designer files in the Code Editor."

I can also "wing" C if I have to - I have some decent PHP experience under my belt, which is the main reason I can read C at all.

[NoQ]

Honestly, the only thing I knew about Qt was the Nokia connection.

Nokia has bought them relatively recently.

[Emdek]

Goth Zagog-Thou, unless you want to use QML then waiting for Qt5 to be released doesn't make sense, best time to start porting Qt4 based applications (here is list of source incompatible changes, probably incomplete) would be after 5.1 or even 5.2.

NoQ, Qt - Nokia relations are a bit more complex now, commercial support was sold to Digia and Qt itself went to open governance.

Stratadrake, I would suggest to abandon VB ASAP, you should check out Qt documentation.
For example low level drawing API:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/QPainter.html

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I'm not waiting. Of course, it's just to see if I can actually do it.

[RBL-4NiK8r]

Wow good to see you back Strata missed you alot over the years even if we did fight a lot back in the day you were a WZGOD and reading about your PC that you made PIESlicer on brought a tear to my eye or was that some dirt in it.

Oh and I didn't forget about you LA just not sure what to say at this time.

[Rman Virgil]

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@ 4nE: I hear ya. Way I see it, we all make mistakes. But I do believe in the value of redemption...if you truly learn and steer a better course going foward, there is... grace. As the saying goes: "To err is human. To forgive, divine."

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[Stratadrake]

It looks like I'm going to have to disable Pie Slicer's DirectX support for now - the DrawPrimitive call it uses for rendering polygons is fundamentally incompatible with VB.Net architecture. In VB6 to draw a primitive you just passed the first element of your vertex array by reference (meaning, the function actually receives a 32-bit pointer to it) and a constant indicating the size (in memory bytes) of the item and DirectX handled things from there - but .Net classifies the parameter as a by-value IntPtr32 and won't let you pun it.

There are other DrawPrimitive calls I may be able to use - but it's probably better to simply upgrade PS to DirectX9 or so.

But at least I'm using a compiler directive to handle it, so I can enable it again with the flip of a switch.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Glad you're getting your "sea legs" back under ya, Strata.

My services for UI development are at your disposal. VS10, VS11, GTK and QT. I triple boot.

[Lord Apocalypse]

I triple boot too.. XP, 7, and kubuntu. You?