Dr. GUI,
I have a question. Can you develop applications on Microsoft Visual Basic, version 4.0 32 bits, generate a setup file and install the app on Win 3.1x with Win32s installed? I tried to do this and I have some errors because the setup utility tries to use the Windows 95/Windows NT registry, which is not available on Win 3.1x. Any suggestions?
Regards,
Francisco Merino
Dr. GUI replies:
Dr. GUI is having a hard time remembering Win16 . . . but as he thinks back to his medical school days, it comes back to him . . . and he's glad those days are OVER.
Dr. GUI even remembers Win32s, which was a subsystem of DLLs that extends the Microsoft Windows 3.1 16-bit operating system by translating 32-bit calls to the underlying 16-bit operating system. Programs written with 32-bit Visual Basic running on Windows 3.1 with Win32s would generally run slower (due to the extra memory and overhead of the translation layer) than the same program created with 16-bit Visual Basic. Instead of using the more limited Win32s features, we chose to have the 32-bit version of Visual Basic 4.0 exploit the more advanced 32-bit features available only on Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows NT.
So even if you got the setup problem solved, your 32-bit Visual Basic 4.0 app wouldn't run under Win16. Use the 16-bit development tools that come with Visual Basic instead.