Re: Minimum VC++ for Multi-Core?
On Sat, 19 May 2007 20:48:02 -0400, Joseph M. Newcomer
<newcomer@flounder.com> wrote:
Part of the problem is that they apparently gave "GUI Bloopers" to the IDE designer and he
mistook it for a "Best Patterns and Practices" book.
That would explain a lot. <g>
If you think this was done because the non-C++ stuff was great and isn't compatible with
C++, I find the IDE every bit as user-hostile when I'm writing C# code. The couple
excursions I did into VB convinced me that the IDE design for VB was pretty horrendous as
well.
The error was in redoing it in a fascist style that prevents users from having easy ways
to do things, in favor of a "uniform model" approach that is actually unusable. Modality
is wrong. We've known this for decades. So why was a fundamentally modeless interface
rewritten as a highly-modal interface? Perhaps naivite, perhaps incompetence. I'm not
sure which, but it was clear there was no oversight on this design by anyone who was
experienced in Human Computer Interface (HCI) issues.
joe
But the new, separate "Event Handler Wizard" and "Add Member Variable
Wizard" now greet you with a friendly "Welcome" message. The sad thing is,
there's nothing about the IDE that requires them to only let you modify one
thing per invocation, nor is there anything that requires the "Event
Handler Wizard" to take you away from the dialog editor and dump you into a
code window. Similarly, adding a handler through the "Control Events"
button in the Properties pane does not have to initiate a script that dumps
you into the code window, requiring you to navigate back to the dialog
editor and click the "Control Events" button again. There's nothing fatal
here that I can see; with just a little more attention, it could be even
better than VC6. I know we've all been asking for this to varying degrees
ever since VC.NET 2002, but two releases later, it's the same old thing.
Hopefully the renewed interest in native code will translate into these IDE
improvements everyone wants. Then again, if MFC is considered unimportant
for new development, I wouldn't expect too much.
--
Doug Harrison
Visual C++ MVP