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Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

yeokhengmeng.com

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Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#31

Post by ygra »

keithnz wrote: post #20
yeokm1 wrote: post #2

I built a Win 3.1 app during a company hackathon just for fun. Here, I detail learnings and process for how a new old app can be created with the aid of modern tools and hindsight of old technologies. And perhaps what lessons can it offer us today. Without the benefit of modern libraries and languages, I had to read up and take care of many low level details, socket programming, HTTP, JSON parsing, UI design in code…

bet you had fancy pants autocomplete also! That was a game changer when it came along....otherwise you had to refer to docs/books.... not to mention the limited screen size.... two monitors? no one was that rich :)

They mention having to look up function declarations in the header files, so perhaps not.

Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#33

Post by ygra »

asveikau wrote: post #18

This presents c89 as the most antiquated thing in the world, but VS didn't support mixed declarations and code in a .c file until 2015. There is still a lot of code out there that avoids this to be able to work with MS's compilers.

... in C mode, which is basically C89 (+ whatever is needed for recent C++ versions). Compiling C code in C++ mode is a common way of working around this. But MSVC is not a C compiler, it's a C++ compiler, so their unwillingness to invest in C is probably understandable.

Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#34

Post by barrkel »

asveikau wrote: post #18

This presents c89 as the most antiquated thing in the world, but VS didn't support mixed declarations and code in a .c file until 2015. There is still a lot of code out there that avoids this to be able to work with MS's compilers.

Could have done it with C++, would have worked for calling WinAPI too.

Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#35

Post by kstenerud »

eb0la wrote: post #24
yeokm1 wrote: post #2

I built a Win 3.1 app during a company hackathon just for fun. Here, I detail learnings and process for how a new old app can be created with the aid of modern tools and hindsight of old technologies. And perhaps what lessons can it offer us today. Without the benefit of modern libraries and languages, I had to read up and take care of many low level details, socket programming, HTTP, JSON parsing, UI design in code…

I expected to be compiled in some kind of VM, not on an actual computer with Windows 3.11 :-). I feel "old-style" documentation is much better than we have now. My most productive _python_ only work times were when I had only the python .hlp file and a _physical_ paper book. What are your impressions?

I've been programming since 1983. The internet opened up publishing to the masses, which means that non-professional people could also publish, resulting in much more documentation than ever before.

But now the amateur documentation writers are competing with the professional ones; the quality of the professional documentation is still as high as ever, but it can be drowned out by the amateur quality documentation.

All in all, finding the information you need is MUCH quicker via a search engine, but the signal-to-noise ratio is lower.

Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#36

Post by tluyben2 »

JordanFarmer wrote: post #26

Nice, Would have been a lot using with Visual Basic 4, but I guess easy wasn't the point.

Same with Delphi. We did decades of applications going from Turbo Pascal in the 80s to Delphi in the 90s and 00s and 10s without hardly any changes (this was possible because I wrote a tooling to convert the DOS Pascal graphics code to Delphi Windows automatically so we ran 1 version of code that compiled on both) right up until the company was sold a couple of years ago.

Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#38

Post by severine »

ink_13 wrote: post #10

Reading this article and others by the same author on his travails of getting Windows 3.11 to install and then bridging it to modern(-ish) tech was like being transported back to the 90s when I was first learning about computers. Seeing those screenshots of the unmistakable Win 3.1-style dialogs was a real nostalgia hit. What a treat. 10 points (well, an upvote, I guess) for anyone who knows why the Windows DOS-mode…

Is it this?

Press F3 to exit setup without rebooting; A bug in the MS-Client installer prevents a file necessary for Windows 3.1x support from being installed. This isn't necessary if running solely under DOS, but it doesn't hurt in anyway, so let's install it just to be safe.

Warning: [Omitted] source link is blocked as malware by Firefox, quote gleaned from [DDG] search results.

Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#39

Post by [deleted] »

ink_13 wrote: post #10

Reading this article and others by the same author on his travails of getting Windows 3.11 to install and then bridging it to modern(-ish) tech was like being transported back to the 90s when I was first learning about computers. Seeing those screenshots of the unmistakable Win 3.1-style dialogs was a real nostalgia hit. What a treat. 10 points (well, an upvote, I guess) for anyone who knows why the Windows DOS-mode…

[deleted]

Re: Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

#40

Post by carey »

ink_13 wrote: post #10

Reading this article and others by the same author on his travails of getting Windows 3.11 to install and then bridging it to modern(-ish) tech was like being transported back to the 90s when I was first learning about computers. Seeing those screenshots of the unmistakable Win 3.1-style dialogs was a real nostalgia hit. What a treat. 10 points (well, an upvote, I guess) for anyone who knows why the Windows DOS-mode…

Are you asking why it’s F3 as opposed to some other key? Because that would be from the IBM CUA standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access.
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