Ask Dr. GUI #33
(He recently walked eight miles in a blizzard to deliver a keg of hot java to stranded developers.)
Dr. GUI's specialists for
this column:
Saji Abraham
Brad Van Ee
Rick Caudle
As you may have heard, Seattle had some hard weather this winter—hard by anyone's standards, not just by the standards of those who almost never see snow. At one point, there was so much snow that Dr. GUI couldn't get to the code hospital to perform bug-ectomies, let alone to Palm Springs or Las Vegas. (Besides, the good doctor remembers the last time he was in Las Vegas, although he doesn't remember getting back.)
In any case, Dr. GUI was stuck at home, burning up his hard-earned vacation time sloshing around in weather that made it difficult to walk, let alone drive. (Unlike a few folks at Microsoft, Dr. GUI doesn't drive a HumVee.) What else could he do except curl up with a cup of Java, visit warmer places on the Web, and do what the good doctor does best: hacking code. The snow is long gone now, but Dr. GUI's glad to have played with some of Microsoft's cool, relatively new technologies that have become the apple of the good doctor's eye.
What green-blooded Microsoft fan could possibly avoid getting one of the hot new Windows CE handheld computers? Dr. GUI was lucky enough to find one in his stocking this year. With the snow falling furiously, he had plenty of time to download the Windows CE SDK beta and try it out.
Programming for Windows CE is fun—it combines the simplicity of the good old days of Windows 3.x with the sophistication of a 32-bit multitasking OS. And the SDK even includes an emulator that will run on your desktop PC, so you can try it out even if you don't own a handheld PC.
Dr. GUI's finally had some time to sit down with Microsoft Visual J++. Learning Java is a little harder than I thought it would be: It's not really accurate to view Java as just C++ minus a few features. The semantics of object references takes some getting used to, as does not having to worry about freeing memory. And a lot of stuff is just plain different than C++ and Windows—some stuff is harder, some stuff is easier.
But now that he's used to it, Dr. GUI once again likes Java. It's fun to program in a language where threads are part of the normal way of doing business. And the weakest part of Java, the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), is about to get some help from Microsoft's new Application Foundation Classes for Java—a new, cross-platform all-Java class library. Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/java/. While you're there, check out the cool tools and documentation in the Microsoft SDK for Java. (You can also write Windows NT services in Java with the latest version of the SDK.) And check out the Visual J++ site at http://www.microsoft.com/visualj/, too!
But the bulk of Dr. GUI's playtime has been spent on Microsoft Visual Studio 97—a bundle of Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, Visual J++, Dr. GUI's beloved MSDN Library (single edition), and the new Visual InterDev, a tool that makes server-side scripting and database access a snap. Visual InterDev is new; the rest of the tools are new versions with significant improvements over previous versions. For example, Dr. GUI is particularly enamored of the following:
Visual Basic 5.0's support for native code (up to 20 times faster) and ability to create ActiveX controls and documents.
Visual C++'s nifty new compiler (faster code by just recompiling) and the ActiveX Template Library, which now supports creation of ActiveX controls with full UI (and makes it easy with Wizards).
Visual J++'s new Java to COM and database wizards.
Having all these tools together in one place and at one price is great—and Dr. GUI's projects, especially Web projects, have almost always been done in multiple languages lately. Visual Studio 97 is just what the doctor ordered!
The bad weather has also made answering questions a bit harder, but we do have a few for you.
Questions in this issue:
Any more forwarding addresses?
And some music for this column: Restart me up!
VB pressed into Windows NT's service