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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#21

Post by gibsonpil »

popcalc wrote: post #3

>As a fellow European, I do not have air conditioning. Is anything stopping the author from buying a heat pump?

It can be hard to justify the cost of installing and maintaining any form of household cooling in colder areas of Europe. Additionally a lot of apartment buildings don't have them, and most landlords probably wouldn't appreciate a tenant installing one without permission. Evidently heatwaves are becoming common enough now that most people should probably keep a window AC unit ready in case of emergencies though.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#23

Post by 7thaccount »

cjk2 wrote: post #13

The painful bit is C++. I did a fair bit of that going back to MFC. Knocking stuff out in C# with WPF and WinForms was quite nice in comparison. I haven’t found anything nicer.

C# with WPF or WinForms only seems nice in comparison to other relatively painful tools IMO.

The old RAD graphical tools and newer ones like Rebol (that are now dated) show just what is possible. Mathematica is also pretty powerful and doesn't require a ton of code.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#24

Post by mjevans »

Windows (MS) and OSX (Apple) need to agree on a GUI interoperability API. Either hammer something out, or adopt one/more of the OSS GUI framework specifications from QT and GTK.

It MUST be open spec. It MUST be free for all/any to implement. It MUST either be included or be in the primary vendor (MS, Apple, distro) software center.

A simple Hello World, click OK to exit the program application should be able to be cross-compiled for any platform, and the resulting binary MUST NOT require including / embedding DLL / library hell like everything today does. It SHOULD be a small entirely dynamic program; possibly a few hundred kilobytes at most but even that seems too large. After all, it would mostly be the basic boilerplate of setting up memory, calling the system library loader, and linking in the shared libraries.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#25

Post by mattgreenrocks »

Unfortunately, if you are insisting on a single exe file, then you have to be way more flexible on your requirements than the author is. There’s a reason that practically every Windows program has an installer. It’s stupid and a waste of time but also probably more of a waste of time to try to be the exception to this rule.

Frankly I don’t see why C# targeting an old (3.5?) .NET framework version wouldn’t work for the author. There seems to be a tendency to fixate on how things should be vs where we are now. C++ native GUI dev is not a mainstay like it used to be.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#27

Post by beart »

Writing GUI apps is painful everywhere, and has been for years.

I remember the half-baked transition from Windows Forms to WPF, which was then taken-over by the Windows Phone initiative, which was also extremely painful and half-baked.

There's a reason electron is so popular, despite all the complaints about it as a platform. Don't blame the electron devs, blame Microsoft for completely failing to support their own platform. That lack of long-term support and consistency extends to a ton of areas in the Windows world, not just GUI development.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#28

Post by gibsonpil »

mdorazio wrote: post #17
bpfrh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on if he lives in a apartment some country/cities have laws against doing any work in the appartment that impacts the outside without permission from the house owner. E.g. you can buy a heatpump but you can't drill the hole in the outer wall. In germany and austria most if not all windows also either open fully to one side or basically bend inwards so you can't install the ac units you install directly into…

Are portable AC units not available in Europe? They are inefficient but can sit inside next to the window and only require that you partially block off a window opening.

I don't know what landlords are like in European countries, but some landlords in America forbid people from connecting any kind of AC exhaust port to a window.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#30

Post by _cenw »

mdorazio wrote: post #17
bpfrh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on if he lives in a apartment some country/cities have laws against doing any work in the appartment that impacts the outside without permission from the house owner. E.g. you can buy a heatpump but you can't drill the hole in the outer wall. In germany and austria most if not all windows also either open fully to one side or basically bend inwards so you can't install the ac units you install directly into…

Are portable AC units not available in Europe? They are inefficient but can sit inside next to the window and only require that you partially block off a window opening.

Power isn't cheap, and inefficient is an understatement. In the heatwave last week in Germany I managed to get ours to cool a tiny bedroom from 30 to maybe 26 degrees Celsius.

Doesn't help that in new construction outer walls are usually very well insulated, and inner walls and floors aren't (by design; 70% of total heating cost is evenly split too), so you're working against your neighbors too. We have some stupidly complex building standards often driven by industry lobbying (which also makes building expensive), but installing a mini split hasn't made it on the list.

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