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From: bcw@rti.rti.org (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: windows programming
Summary: Windows programming
Keywords: programming windows
Message-ID: <1991Feb11.145406.25001@rti.rti.org>
Date: 11 Feb 91 14:54:06 GMT
References: <12123@ur-cc.UUCP>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 58

In article <12123@ur-cc.UUCP>, dubs_cif@troi.cc.rochester.edu (/* Jeremy DuBois */) writes:
> 
>   I like windows lots, but I dunno C.  I have no money for SDK.  Can you
> make windows programs like k00l games and stuff with basic? can somebody
> give me some lists for how to make windwos things?  

You can't really do much with Basic under Windows - you can run it in
DOS mode, which doesn't look too bad if you are running on a 386, but
for 286 and 8088 machines it only works full-screen (like any other
DOS program).  Offhand I'm not sure that there are very many Basic's
that would be reasonable to use for programming Windows, even in
principle, if you are using the SDK.  You need to be able to manipulate
some data types that most Basic's don't have (pointers and such).

There are rumors of a Microsoft Basic product in development that will
run under Windows as a native Windows app.  How much Windows a program 
written in this Basic would be able to do (as opposed to how much the
Basic interpreter/compiler is integrated into the Windows environment)
is an open question.

The only alternatives to the SDK are to wait to see what Borland
announces this week (which may or may not help much, depending on
when it will be available and whether you still have to use the SDK),
or to look at something like Actor (but development environments like
this are usually not cheap).

Sorry, but in the current state of the world Windows programming is
expen$ive.  That may change soon.

>   oh, also, how come windows goes really slow when there are like ten 
> copies of paintbrush running? is there a trick to fix this? cause I
> like to have lots of k00l pictures on the screen so I just load 'em up
> in paintbrush but then things go real sluggy.

You've just run out of memory or some other system resource.  Most
likely memory if you have ten copies of Paintbrush running:  Paintbrush
is a real memory hog.  As you note Windows does not handle this 
situation quite as nicely as it might - it tends to hit a "wall" 
rather than degrade gracefully.  In fairness, this is a hard problem;  
but other operating systems have addressed it better than Windows does.

Sometimes other things can run out - especially if you are running
some public domain or shareware programs.  I've played around with
a lot of the PD/SW programs for Windows, and an awful lot of them
are very buggy.  Lots of them have memory leaks (allocate memory
but never free it), or resource leaks (such as allocating handles
but never freeing them - handles are a special system resource that
are managed separately from the main memory area).  Even some
commercial software for Windows has problems like this, but there's
very little of the PD/SW software for Windows that isn't riddled 
with bugs.  Not to say that there aren't a few gems out there, but
they are few and far between.

The trick to fix it is either get more memory or don't run so many
copies of Paintbrush.  Or else try to determine which program is
leaking your memory away if you're running a lot of PD/SW code ...

						Bruce C. Wright