pcb@usl.usl.edu (Peter C. Bahrs) (04/17/89)
I have SDK, Windows 386 (both are the newest upgrades) DOS 3.3 and an IBM PS/2 Model 70 with 3MB Memory. First of all, I think commandw.pif is great...I can run procomm, telnet, edix and even compile, link and execute a C program from windows.!!! I think this was on the windows diskettes???? I thought I would put some heat on the development environment to get some valued discussion and get off of the MS/Apple gossip (why speculate on what a judge will decide?) The *.doc, *.txt, *.wri and *.star upgrade documents that MS Distrubutes is terribly unorganized. With so many products from microsoft and upgrades, keeping track of bug fixes and enhancements is a real problem. I am still having several problems with the whole environment. (Oh, by the way, we ARE IBM compatible!). Microsoft put me on hold for 10 minutes twice (yes, I held on) and finally recommended that I subscribe to the $450/year hotline. I am really disappointed; I have ususally received good response from MS. I will put the situations on the net and post any answers that I may receive directly. 1a) I think the PS/2 has 3MB - 640K of extended memory. So I put: windowsemmsize=2048 and emmsize=2048 in the win.ini file. I understand that this tells windows to use 2MB of the 2MB of extended memory that I want to use as expanded memory. The about box on dos executive immediately says that I have 530k memory and 1750 of expanded memory. a) Where has the 300k of expanded memory gone to? b) My application wants to allocated large amounts of memory that certainly is available in expanded memory, but GlobalCompact does not seem to recognize it?! My application bombs (gracefully) because I seem to be limited to the amount of conventional memory left. c) How does dos executive differentiate between conventional and expanded memory? I do not see an SDK call for this. 1b) When using the debugging version of the environment, I have gone through the copy win86.com ... that I found in some document to get codeview to (periodically, see below) work. Does this have to be redone (reinstall software?) if I install more memory? 2) I think the way fonts and font matching occurs is ridiculous. I have 5 different output devices for displaying text and graphic reports. We have been able to get the devices to print 'similar' output only after numerous tries. I am never 'sure' of the exact font that I will get!!! MS sent out a readcvw.wri file that says in the file 'this file is formatted for a HP laserjet printer....' What the heck does this mean!!! This file will not print all of the contents on 3 different dot matrix printers I have. Why the heck is MS developing a distribution file specific to a printer. Why is the file specific to a printer? Is is a font difficulty problem? I thought the whole idea behind printing with graphics and fonts with sdk, gdi et. al was to be device independent!!!! 3) We print large data reports between 1 and 120 pages. Spooler will only allow 20 jobs to be buffered at a time. So the user can either wait and print 6 jobs @ 20 pages or one giant job. But we have to be able to print page N by itself, thus we need the ability to print ranges of pages. I would like to let the user specify pages J to K and use P pages per job. I haven't seen any other windows product that allows the user to specify the number of items in a job from a textual document. This doesn't sound unreasonable, unix itroff (or variations) provide the -o13-15 option. NEWFRAME escape starts a new page but NEXTBAND will not start a new page. I have to do a STARTDOC to reset the rectangle for NEXTBAND and to get a new page. (is this right?) STARTDOC/NEWFRAME/ENDOC is considerably slower than the STARTDOC/NEXTBAND/ENDOC sequence. So we have to use banding. I am stuck with either a large job or individual paged jobs. 4) Our application uses 20 .obj files. When using the debugging kernel, does the stack or heap size have to be increased? What are good values for these anyway? What and how should the buffers and files sizes be configured to? I read somewhere (in a *.star file) that a stack N,M command should be used in config.sys. I have NEVER used this with any other application? What is this for? The debugger works 80% of the time. Some times I get the Fatal Error message (maybe my memory is screwed up as described above). Sometimes (most of the time) when I try to find a string with /string/ it is not found when it is there. I am using a remote terminal at com1: and basically the debugger is not behaving properly. Some of the errors received when it continually crashes are not listed in the windows manual (some appendix) and if they are, the meaning listed does not mean anything intelligible. MS has a list of the errors that I never received in a *.star file, I am not sure why? /*-These views are mine...---Thanks in advance for any response...-------+ | Peter C. Bahrs UUCP ... !uunet!dalsqnt!usl!pcb | | The USL-NASA Project ... !cs.utexas.edu!usl!pcb | | Center For Advanced Computer Studies INET pcb@usl.usl.edu | | University of Southwestern Louisiana | | Lafayette, LA 70504 | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------*/
paulc@microsoft.UUCP (Paul Canniff 2/1011) (04/22/89)
In article <246400004@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> mms00786@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > >I am a Computer Engg student, and I had decided to learn programming for a >windowing system (Mac, MSWindows, or PM) this summer. Being a diehard IBM >fan, I had almost decided on MSWindows. But all the notes I have read, and this >ridiculous court suit, etc. are pretty negative (every single one of them). Is >all this heartache worth it? Or would my efforts be better suited to learning >'Macintosh Programmers Workshop'? [ remainder deleted ] If you have IBM hardware, and want to learn how windowing systems work, it would be wise to use MS-Windows. Or PM if you have an OS/2 SDK, but that's more $$$. The things you will learn will include a lot of Windows-specific things, BUT you will also learn very important lessons in user-interface design, graphics, data presentation, fonts, etc etc etc. Unless you have a job lined up that is Mac-specific, use the product that runs on your hardware. If you later get a chance to use the Mac interface, do it. These skills are additive, even though some specific tricks (like Window's memory management) may not be globally useful. All windowing environments have differences. But knowing any one of them gives you a big head start for learning a different one! A completely unofficial opinion from ... Paul Canniff Microsoft