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From: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Graphics on Windows 3.0 and PM
Message-ID: <4335@tuminfo1.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de>
Date: 8 Sep 90 08:35:12 GMT
References: <1990Sep07.123451.24798@abblund.se>
Sender: news@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de
Reply-To: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, TU Muenchen, W. Germany
Lines: 37

In article <1990Sep07.123451.24798@abblund.se> henrik@abblund.se writes:
>Which are the major Graphics Programming Interface differences between
>Presentation Manager and Windows 3.0? Is the interface to Windows 3.0
>a subset of the interface to PM.

No it is very different. If you restrict yourself to some basic
graphics, such as lines, circles and not very much more, you can write
you a small library to emulate one system on the other. But when you
begin using some advanced things, like color bitmaps in memory device
contexts, for example, you don't have big chances for portable code. I
had a small EYES program laying around (which tracks the mouse pointers
position) for Windows from someone other which I enhanced a bit. I
started to convert it to PM but stopped this after some hours. It was
*MUCH* easier to rewrite it from scratch.

Periodically there appear "portatbility" articles for Windows/PM/Mac in 
the MS Systems Journal or elsewhere but I had always the impression that

1. the methods work only for simple programs 
2. and are very slow.

The Software Migration Kit from MS should allow you to port Windows apps
to PM with special libraries but for one or two programmers maintaining
a Windows app it is rather difficult to create such two-system-programs
themselves without such support. I did not yet see the SMK but heard
rumors that it is included with the WIndows 3.0 SDK. Is this true?
Microsoft Germany told me on Thursday that it will take another two or
three weeks before I will get the SDK 3.0 update. Somtimes I have the
impression to live on the back side of the moon in Germany :-(

Kai Uwe Rommel

--
/* Kai Uwe Rommel
 * Munich
 * rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de
 */