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I fixed Windows native development

marler8997.github.io

21–30 of 406 posts

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#22
post #3

This is harder than what I do. Just install LTSC Visual Studio build tools from [1], then chuck this in a cmd file: cl yourprogram.c /link user32.lib advapi32.lib ... etc etc ... I've built a load of utilities that do that just fine. I use vim as an editor. The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though. see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/visualstudio/relea…

> The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though.

You only get access to the LTSC channel if you have a license for at least Visual Studio Professional (Community won't do it); so a lot of hobbyist programmers and students are not aware of it.

On the other hand, its existence is in my experience very well-known among people who use Visual Studio for work at some company.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#24
post #16

At the risk of being that guy , I haven't had any issues onboarding people onto native projects written in Rust. rustup does a great job of fetching the required toolchains without issue. I'd imagine the same is also true of Go or Zig.

You have to do this for certain rust things too. I can't remember which, but I inevitably run into a need to install the MSVC toolchain to compile rust. I think it might be related to FFI, or libs which use FFI? The same thing comes up in Linux, but the process to install it is different.

I got anxiety reading the article, describing exactly why it sucks. It's nice to know from the article and comments here there are ways around it, but the way I have been doing it was the "hope I check the right checkboxes and wait a few hours" plan. There is usually one "super checkbox" that will do the right things.

I have to do this once per OS [re]install generally.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#26
post #3

This is harder than what I do. Just install LTSC Visual Studio build tools from [1], then chuck this in a cmd file: cl yourprogram.c /link user32.lib advapi32.lib ... etc etc ... I've built a load of utilities that do that just fine. I use vim as an editor. The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though. see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/visualstudio/relea…

> The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though. You only get access to the LTSC channel if you have a license for at least Visual Studio Professional (Community won't do it); so a lot of hobbyist programmers and students are not aware of it. On the other hand, its existence is in my experience very well-known among people who use Visual Studio for work at som…

You can install the LTSC toolchain without a license. Just not the IDE.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#27
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Any user interface toolkit that isn't at least 10 years old should be ignored on windows unless you want to rewrite everything one day.

Why? You may end up with something that doesn't get much attention anymore, but none of the official gui approaches have ever been removed as far as I know. Win32, MFC, winforms, wpf, winui, maui are all still available and apps using them are functional. Even winjs still works apparently, even if it was handed over. I wouldn't start an app in most of them today, but I wouldn't rewrite one either without a good reaso…

Well a number of them have horrific bugs in them which have zero attention. At least win32 has an abstraction level which allows you to work around them.

There’s a fun bug on WPF and form backgrounds for example which means on fractional DPI screens the background is tiled unpredictably. Had to patch that one up rather quickly one day and it was a mess due to how damn complicated WPF is.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#28
post #12

And here I was messing with MingW64… This is fantastic and someone at Microslop should take notes.

Exacly.. I avoid Visual Studio.. I try to build everthing using Mingw..

Clang is the better alternative to MinGW because it can use standard Windows libraries and avoids the need for additional runtime.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#29
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if people still use WinForms, MFC and WPF...

Still migrating an enterprise app off WPF to this day.

What are you moving to out of interest? I’ve seen people talking of moving ours to Electron which seems to just be more problems waiting.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#30
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Any user interface toolkit that isn't at least 10 years old should be ignored on windows unless you want to rewrite everything one day.

I wonder if people still use WinForms, MFC and WPF...

They certainly do.
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