Re: Q) CCombobox only displays one item.
"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@flounder.com> wrote in message
news:jd3dh5tgg7kt7k83of7acc8v4ttmuk26rc@4ax.com...
I'm curious. What do *you* mean by "weird"? I'm asked about WPF often by
my clients, who
think they may want to move some of their simple-GUI-task development to
it ("because it's
new") and don't know if it is worth investing in the retraining. And all
I can say is "I
have no idea, I know very little about it".
I did a 10 month contract with WPF, I was lucky, the client paid for my
training. :-) The best part of WPF is it lets you have more freedom to
design non-gray, more than one font type of UI's. It's as easy to use
gradients and such as it is not to, and I dare say the UI was very
attractive (for someone with no artistic skills) and highly usable. Instead
of .rc files, you specify forms using XAML. That's OK, in fact XAML is
highly expressive and is better than .rc files.
But also in XAML you define things like data binding, animations, etc. This
is where it is very confusing. The exact XML to specify exactly what you
want is not well documented, you just have to google for an example close
enough to what you want and hope something turns up. I had a really hard
time with a tree view data bound to an internal class, and I wanted to
specify certain data members to appear in the first level of the tree and
other data members to appear in the second level, etc. but I think I ended
up ditching the data binding and just populated the tree with the text I
wanted. It doesn't help when the API names are really long and have
esoteric meanings either - the API is very far removed from computer science
fundamentals (they are nowhere to be found) so I could not leverage my
background. This is what I meant by "weird".
The API is also immature. For example, I wanted to scroll my view in a
custom way when the scrollbar arrow is clicked. But I was not getting any
event for that. I filed a bug on Connect and (wonder of wonders) actually
did get some feedback that it was a bug and the workaround was very low
level involving some XAML hack, I think.
All in all, WPF is not something an MFC programmer would fall in love with
(at least I didn't). That's why I'm so disappointed in .NET 3 and later.
Instead of continuing the evolution of lovable improvements such as the
migration of assembler -> C -> C++ -> Frameworks like MFC -> Managed
productivity (C# and WinForms), we end up with something not lovable.
-- David