[comp.lang.pascal] TPWin: A really spiffy windows aplication but far from perfect

magid@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Magid) (04/12/91)

	I just received my copy of TPWin and it is a beautiful product down to 
the very spiffy instillation.  But I have already found a major flaw in it.

If you have a graphics card with a resolution greater than 640x480 forget about
using the debugger.  After you exit  your screen is messed up and windows is
unusable.  This forces you to exit and restart windows.  This is totally 
unacceptable.  I called Borland and the tech support person there blamed it on
the dll that Borland got from Microsoft to do debugging.  (When in trouble pass
the buck)  I then asked whether there was a fix in the works, because this IS A
BUG, and she said that she could not tell me because they are relying on
Microsoft.


If you use TPW and you have a graphics card with resolution greater than 640x480
mail "bugs@borland.com" because this is a bug and it needs to be fixed, and 
maybe if they get enough e-mail they will not respond in a slothful manner.


On another subject I tried to get the icons out of Winword but the resource toolkit informed me that it was not a win 3 app.  What absolute rubbish!  Is there
a way around this, and what exactly is going on here?  {I do have version 1.1a}



Paul Magid

sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) (04/12/91)

magid@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Magid) writes:
>If you have a graphics card with a resolution greater than 640x480 forget about
>using the debugger.  After you exit  your screen is messed up and windows is
>unusable.  This forces you to exit and restart windows.  This is totally 
>unacceptable.  I called Borland and the tech support person there blamed it on
>the dll that Borland got from Microsoft to do debugging.  (When in trouble pass
>the buck)  I then asked whether there was a fix in the works, because this IS A
>BUG, and she said that she could not tell me because they are relying on
>Microsoft.

This is not true. It's one of the few things about Windows that we
*can't* blame on a Microsoft DLL :-). I'm sorry about that you
received misinformation. Check out the code I posted the other day to
comp.windows.ms.programmer, which can be run to clean the screen after
you exit TDW. It works best if you use a shell program that lets you
attach it to a hot key, because then you don't need to be able to see
anything on the messed up screen in order to run it. A slightly more
awkward alternative is to run a dummy bat file, which causes Windows
to blank and repaint the screen when it goes to and from full screen
mode.

>If you use TPW and you have a graphics card with resolution greater than 640x480
>mail "bugs@borland.com" because this is a bug and it needs to be fixed, and 
>maybe if they get enough e-mail they will not respond in a slothful manner.

There is no need. This is already being addressed as a high priority
item. It is tricky, because we lose some of the Windows device
independence features by tricking it into acting as a text-mode
debugger, but we are working on it.

>On another subject I tried to get the icons out of Winword but the resource toolkit informed me that it was not a win 3 app.  What absolute rubbish!  Is there
>a way around this, and what exactly is going on here?  {I do have version 1.1a}

That's because Winword is a Windows 2 app that has been just been
marked as a Window 3 app. There's not much interesting there anyway,
just a bunch of cursors and the one icon :-). There used to be a
product on the market, Resource Workshop, from EdenSoft, that could
handle both Windows 2 and 3 files, but I don't know of anything
currently available that does that.

 -- sidney markowitz <sidney@borland.com>

drift@qut.edu.au (Glenn Wallace) (04/13/91)

In article <1991Apr11.234826.8912@agate.berkeley.edu>, magid@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Magid) writes:
> If you have a graphics card with a resolution greater than 640x480 forget about
> using the debugger.  After you exit  your screen is messed up and windows is
> unusable.  This forces you to exit and restart windows.  This is totally 
> unacceptable.  I called Borland and the tech support person there blamed it on
> the dll that Borland got from Microsoft to do debugging.  (When in trouble pass
> the buck)  I then asked whether there was a fix in the works, because this IS A
> BUG, and she said that she could not tell me because they are relying on
> Microsoft.

MS's single monitor Codeview uses a driver called VCV.SYS ( and its a windows
one from memory - so much for .drv) that handles non-VGA debugging.
Don't ask me how to get it. MS will tell you to get lost.

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oivindt@bio.uio.no (Oivind Toien) (04/18/91)

In article <1991Apr12.010207.18663@borland.com> sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) writes:

> received misinformation. Check out the code I posted the other day to
> comp.windows.ms.programmer, which can be run to clean the screen after
> you exit TDW. It works best if you use a shell program that lets you
> attach it to a hot key, because then you don't need to be able to see
> anything on the messed up screen in order to run it. A slightly more
> awkward alternative is to run a dummy bat file, which causes Windows
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^     
> to blank and repaint the screen when it goes to and from full screen
> mode.

Activating a dummy .bat file (that does nothing), to switch to
full-screen-mode and back again does not fix up the messed up screen
after returning from TDW on my system (33MHz 386 with 8MB memory,
Genoa super VGA 800 x 600, 16 color mode).

I suppose the screen repainting procedure does not work either on my
system then. (Else it would have been nice if it also had been
posted, coded in Turbo-Pascal.  Many TPW-users including 
myself do not have a C-compiler and are not too familiar with C).

Anyone else got this working on a similar configuration?
--
Oivind Toien   <oivindt@ulrik.uio.no>
Div. of General Physiology, Dept. of Biology, Univ. of Oslo
P.O. Box 1051, N-0316 Oslo 3, NORWAY  
Phone+47-2-454732  Fax+47-2-454726