HPC Developer Group?

@AbyssKnight: that IDE sounds exceptionally interesting. Can you drop me a mail, or PM, or something on how you're progressing? I'd like to help if I can.

@ShadowMaster: it's not a black art, it's simply windows API programming with a bit more thought about memory management, performance and power management - particularly handling the WM_HIBERNATE message.

If you have programmed Windows, WinCE is pretty much exactly the same. Your skills are portable. If you've used MFC, then WinCE MFC is damn close from what I see - but I personally don't use MFC at the moment...

@C:Amie:
If you've programmed any event driven system in any language, there'll likely be a message loop involved and an API to work with. The concepts of WinCE are so close to practically every event-driven system that I've worked on that there's no huge learning curve for experienced developers providing you can think about limiting memory and battery consumption!

Saying all this, it is of course subtly different from Win32 programming in that the API is largely a subset of what's available. In most cases, it's the older stuff that's disappeared from the API.

I think Shadow was the one who mentioned the IDE.

In regards to the comments about Win32, most of the work I've done is all commandline or web based so its 'frikkin hard'!

Ha, yes - very true!

Moderate amounts of VB and Basic, but not through an IDE here, so my experience is the limiting factor in my comprehension of the subject.

Win32 programming isn't as scary as it looks. It just involves a little getting used to.

If you look abstractly enough, a Win32 program is about the same as any simple C++ program, just with a little extra eye candy. There's a lot of proprietary data typing, a truckload of macros, and message handling, but once you get used to looking at such things, it's no more scary than printf("Hello World\n";

Since I have the RSS Reader project currently going, I'll give a briefing of what I had going into it, and what I have now.

I started with only a basic familiarity of Win32 from one of my projects from years past. In my previous project, it was simply a matter of a couple buttons and an edit control in a dialog-box to act as a front-end to something.

Right now, I'm dealing with Window Controls, Registry keys, Files, HTTP requests. I've dealt with Files using Streaming I/O before, but not using Win32 functions, and I've dealt sort of dealt with HTTP requests by way of AJAX, but that's about it.

The fact is, once someone has a strong familiarity of C++, grasping Win32 doesn't take too long. SDK references, Technical articles, and sample programs are the best friends of someone who is trying to grasp a new concept with a background in the fundamentals.

I for one would like to see a HPC Developer Network. I would agree that MSDN references can't be beat, so perhaps we should focus on Technical Articles and Sample Programs - an area where MSDN is lacking.

I'll let u know when I finish the IDE (for pgcc mainly)

C:Amie, all an IDE does is make programming more convinient, by doing things for you. So if you have programmed at all, it is generally easier on an IDE.

I will take another look at eVC tonight if I get a chance. I opened the Hello World program and was shocked at how much code it took... I am really interested in seeing how this thread develops, as it would greatly help me get into actual GUI and Win32 programming.

Ditto here - shocking! I found that the CE programming book I have starts with a "hello world" example as well. Around 3 or 4 pages of code I believe! I think a lot of that is things you have to initialize anyway in any program so the real "meat" of the code isn't that bad. I think I'll put that book under my pillow at night and see if anything "absorbs" through it... I really don't think it will be that bad, just have to spend some time with it and run through some tutorials to get going.

The first thing to understand ... is that Windows GUI are based on a messaging system... and you'll need to define your own "message processing procedure" for receiving and sending them......

Windows send messages to all the opened windows and waits for their replies. You need to parse those messages in every window and dialog of your application.
Besides the message itself, windows may send parameters according the message issued.
There will be messages when a button is pressed.. when text is changed in a edit box.... when a box is checked, when focus change and so on... You may also need to send messages sometimes.
In Windows standard headers (for both desktop and CE platform) every window message is a constant starting with WM_
so you have WM_NOTIFY, WM_COMMAND, WM_INITDIALOG, WM_CLOSE, WM_PAINT
and a lot more...
By example WM_INITDIALOG is a message sent by the OS to a dialog before showing it, so you might probably want to set default values in your GUI, posicionate items before they got displayed and then let Windows draw your Dialog...
When a button is pressed.... Windows sends the WM_COMMAND message with the ID of the button as parameter (together with the event info).

I hope that clarifies some basic stuff.......

Pfft...



Hello Worlds can be as small or as large as you care to make them. Bear in mind most examples are showing you how to register a window class, create a window then set up a message loop: no matter how small your code is, it'll always take a bit of text to get that working.

Work through it, understand the basics and you'll have a good grounding on any system in any language

Oh now I'm just torn between eVB and eVC. More reason to expand the developer section!

On a sidenote, I've been reading devbuzz.com (PPC eVB/eVC site)... and I just hate the way its organized. It's atrociously hard to navigate.

abyssknight,

My advice to you if you think you cna handle it is to go with VC. Visual Basic is a very small subset of what most would consider to be a full IDE. At worse you cannot generate .exe files, you have to send .vb files along as the application, the interface cusomisations are more limited - you can't even change the title bar icon! There is also the requirement for the run times and the greater install footprint for less code.
VC is by far better in all these regards. Plus you get icon editing tools along with it.

For future proofing VC is also better, as should you want to program for CE4.x or 5.0, and want to do it in VB. You need to buy yourself Visual Studio and do it all in .net rather than in VB6. While the step up to C++ .net is there, I don't believe they have made too many massive changes, and the redist of eVC4 is free.

My two pennies.

In my opinion, EVB is great for quick hacks/proof of concepts/getting your toes wet with development. Once you get a feel for it, look at C. Stick with the WinCE API to start off with rather than MFC, as it's a more transferable skill and doesn't require an in-depth knowledge of the MFC object structure or any ClassWizard stuff.

I still need to progress up to writing proper C++... One day...

Never ever use MFC.... for software's sake.