martti@spencer.cs.uoregon.edu (Martti Kantola) (11/10/89)
I am an OS/2 novice who is supposed to be porting an application from Macintosh to OS/2 Presentation Manager and it feels kind of lonely. Nobody seems to know a d.. thing about OS/2. I have a brand new PS/2 model 70 (4 MB, 60 MB HD) on my desk with OS/2 Extended Edition 1.1 and Microsoft C 5.1 running in it but that does not seem to be quite enough. I still need one of several programmer's toolkits before I can start bounding out code. I've been calling around for these toolkits but they sure are hard to find let alone that somebody would be able to tell what they're like. I would like to get comments about the following four products that I have considered. Information on how they compare with each other would be especially helpful. I have a hunch that at least Microsoft products are more or less subsets of each other. - OS/2 Programming Tools and Information 1.2 (IBM) - CASE:PM (Caseworks) - OS/2 Software Development Kit (Microsoft) - OS/2 Programmer's Toolkit 1.1 (Microsoft) I need a toolkit with full windowing capabilities. It should run with OS/2 Extended Edition 1.1 as well as version 1.2 when when it comes available. I also need to call the Database Manager from within my C-programs. If you have used any of these toolkits and have an idea on how they would fit my requirements, please drop me a note. Thanks in advance for information. Martti Kantola University of Oregon, Dept. of Computer Science.
scottn@cpqhou.UUCP (Scott Nesbitt) (11/16/89)
I have found that case:pm to be pretty useless. It does not provide any extra service that is not easy to make yourself. The microsoft toolkit is a necessity, though.
scottp@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Scott Peterson) (11/16/89)
According to Microsoft, the SDK program is dead. The SDK for OS/2 1.1 was the last. Sometime next year there will be something equivalent to an SDK for 1.2. I haven't tried the 1.1 SDK on 1.2 yet. It might not work. CASE:PM will not replace the SDK. In fact, you can think of it as an interface to all the tools in the SDK (though it does more than that). CASE:PM is relatively wart-free, and it will let you write the PM equivalent of the hello world program in about 20 minutes. I'm having trouble making it handle a more complex program, but I'm a PM neophyte. If it were my money, and I had the weeks to spend reading PM manuals, I'd save the $900 and do it without CASE:PM (but we don't, so we tried it). --- Scott Peterson scottp@eecs.cs.pdx.edu uunet!tektronix!radix!sdp
lau@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Patrick Lau) (11/17/89)
In reply to a question on OS/2 Programmer's Toolkit, Scott Nesbitt writes: >I have found that case:pm to be pretty useless. It does not >provide any extra service that is not easy to make yourself. >The microsoft toolkit is a necessity, though. I am also thinking of buying case:pm. Could Scott be more explicit about the above claim? Does anyone else have any opinion on case:pm? Also, I have a OS/2 Programmer's Toolkit by IBM. Is there is difference between that and the toolkit by MicroSoft? Thanks.
scottn@cpqhou.UUCP (Scott Nesbitt) (11/21/89)
In article <17051@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU>, lau@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Patrick Lau) writes: > In reply to a question on OS/2 Programmer's Toolkit, Scott Nesbitt writes: > >I have found that case:pm to be pretty useless. It does not > >provide any extra service that is not easy to make yourself. > > I am also thinking of buying case:pm. Could Scott be more explicit about > the above claim? Does anyone else have any opinion on case:pm? Well, you cannot create a subclass or a child window under case:pm without going in and directly modifying their code. Anything non-standard must be done manually. It appears to me that case:pm provides the equivalence of the first two weeks of learning pm programming. If that is worth the price to you, then you may find case:pm to be a good purchase. To me, the essentials are: - thorough knowledge of C - Advanced OS/2 Programming by Ray Duncan - Programming the OS/2 Presentation Manager by Charles Petzold - the toolkit (I know of no difference between Microsoft and IBM)