john@utafll.uta.edu (John Baima) (04/18/91)
Well, I've been using TPWin for a little over two weeks. While there are both good points and bad points, TPWin is definitely a killer app. It is a killer in the sense that I think it will sell a lot of copies, and it will suppress any other Pascal for Windows. (Isn't Microsoft happy that their VP for language development went to Borland??) The docs weigh in at slightly over 2,000 pages. There is also fairly complete help available through the Win3 hypertext help program. This on-line help includes the full Windows API. Some might think the hypertext help was worth the price of the whole program if they got it at the update or educational price. The ObjectWindows classes are well thought out and greatly help with some of the more difficult problems. While there is a large amount of sample code on disk besides the manuals, there are still large areas where one will have to grope along. I am finding Petzold's book helpful, but it is not ideal. Besides having to look at icky C code :-), ObjectWindows does things in it's own way. In 6 months when there are several books giving additional help, programming in TPWin will be much less painful. One area that I have struggled with is creating a decent Paint method (this is called in response to a WM_PAINT message). There are really no good examples of Paint methods for real applications. Nothing close to the scroll examples in Chapter 2 of Petzold. So, I spent about half of today creating a SYSMETS3 type of program with a real paint method with scrolling. Yes, I know that there are Paint methods in the examples, but all of them basically repaint the whole context every call. The editor is uninspired, but functional. No macros. Sigh. It does remember where I left off, including whether the program was open or closed to an icon. The Debugger is quite nice, although I did find it worthwhile to get my extra monochrome monitor and video card out of the closet and plug it in. If you are going to use TPWin a lot, it would be worth the extra $100 for another monitor and card. While I did have problems with the stand alone debugger, I don't use that much because the integrated debugger works just fine. The Whitewater Resource Toolkit is nice, although it does not do fonts. I'd rather have outline fonts anyway, but the price of creating outlines is quite high. The bottom line is that TPWin really is a killer app. However, Windows is still, well, *Windows* and programming for it is non-trivial. When the TPWin books come rolling in, it will make life easier for all. However, I don't really think that it is the language vendors responsibility to fully document the API with examples (Although it would be nice!). If you want to program Windows in Pascal, by all means get a copy. TPWin only makes Windows apps. -- John Baima john@utafll.uta.edu