posted January 04, 2007 02:27 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Fred Harris:
I find myself in the position of having to redo an incredible
amount of programming to replace my DOS data collector system
with a Windows CE replacement.

---

Bye!

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posted January 04, 2007 03:55 PM            

Yes, I've worked with that some. When I realized for sure
that it was going to be Win CE or nothing I worked with the Pocket
DOS quite a bit. My programs wouldn't run under it without
major modifications, unfortunately. The manufacturer of the
data collectors actually had a special release of PocketDOS just
for their units. I was looking at several weeks of hard
coding to modify my programs to run under PocketDOS, and in the
back of my mind I'm thinking there are several weeks or more of
hard work which doesn't bring me any closer to having CE programs
so I gave it up.

At this point I probably have six months of work into a
special data entry grid I'm developing. And I'm not sure if
my idea to give up on the PocketDOS was right. The problems
I was having with it could have been overcome in their entirety
by reprogramming on my part of the old DOS programs.

I'll tell you though what really bums a person out. Its
when you've done an excellent job at creating a system that
works very well and no one has anything bad to say about it, and
you have to reproduce it on another system not because its broke,
or wasn't good, or anything like that, but because its not the
'latest' from Microsoft. And when the 'latest' isn't the
greatest platform for what you're trying to do, that doesn't help
either.

Somewhere here in one of the forums I saw an old post from
Tom Hanlin where he stated that PowerBASIC actually gets more
requests for Windows CE than for Linux (I'm not holding my breath
for either).

In terms of programming I will say the Windows CE is
interesting. Its not a 'minimalist' system, I wouldn't say. In
terms of the GUI Api it is nearly wholly intact in terms of
desktop Windows. Here and there there is something missing,
but not much. TextOut() is missing but DrawText() is there.
I'd guess from the standpoint of PowerBASIC, the situation is
somewhat similiar to with Linux, i.e., lack of standardization.
With Windows CE there are about a dozen different processors.
And every device\model gets a unique operating system build
depending on functionality and components on the device.

posted January 04, 2007 04:27 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fred Harris:
I'll tell you though what really bums a person out. Its
when you've done an excellent job at creating a system that
works very well and no one has anything bad to say about it, and
you have to reproduce it on another system not because its broke,
or wasn't good, or anything like that, but because its not the
'latest' from Microsoft.

---

About Windows Mobile... IMHO, even if it's not a popular argument here, .NET (let be it VB.NET o C#) is simply the most effective way/choice to develop for it, and it's not so bad at all.

Bye!

posted January 04, 2007 04:38 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Frank Crowder:
freedos

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Well the website looks a little less amateur than this time last year and it is $35 a seat cheaper than DRDOS, maybe I'll have a dabble.

posted January 04, 2007 05:14 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Michael Mattias:
You, sir, need a day off. [/B]

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Michael,

You're right, for the wrong reason. I simply don't need 95% of what Windows can do,
and I certainly don't need 100% of the support headaches caused by its high maintenance profile,
or by users tinkering with the platform. This application is feature-poor, fast, easy to learn,
and stable, and for 80% of its functionality uses a dedicated PC, effectively an embedded system.
Users don't give a fig what OS it runs on. Moving it to Windows was a bad decision in many ways,
the only thing that works better in Windows is the remote support, and by golly you need it to sort out Windows,
anti-virus, firewall, etc etc.

I'm still stuck with Windows for other applications, worst luck.

posted January 04, 2007 05:26 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Frank Crowder:

DOS may need a 'Mobility Chair' to get around, but its not dead yet!

---

Frank, that's a very telling remark! It does not seem to me to be wildly eccentric to view OSs as tools.
To pursue that analogy, if I want to put a nail in a fence post, I reach for a hammer.
The prevalent view appears to be that the right tooling for that job is a generator, compressor and nail gun.
If DOS does the job, why look for anything more complex? Does a hammer need a "mobility chair" because it's been around for a while?

posted January 04, 2007 05:46 PM            

quote:

---

The prevalent view appears to be that the right tooling for that job is a generator, compressor and nail gun.

---

One of the things that amazes me more than anything else though, is the lack of detailed understanding for the O/S that most (all?) of us use to program on. I don't know why Windows is so intimidating to so many technically oriented people, especially since it is the foundation of nearly all we do. I've seen posts by people afraid to do a simple upgrade for fear of breaking something. Ok, things break, but why are so many people unprepared to fix it? This is the world we live in and the market we make our livings in. Doesn't it seem rather obvious that we should learn how to work the beast instead of simply fear it all our lives?

posted January 04, 2007 06:32 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Joe Byrne:
Doesn't it seem rather obvious that we should learn how to work the beast instead of simply fear it all our lives?

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Folks who were used to the MS-DOS environment were intimidated by Windows because of it's size and complexity. On one hand, you had an operating system that had, what? 30 or so system calls? To the Windows API which has thousands (tens of thousands if you throw in the various subsystems). You have a programming model that, compared to the relatively straight-forward "top-down" procedural style of command line programs to the event-driven model in Windows.

Just as you have folks who just can't wrap their heads around object-oriented programming. It's not what they're used to, and because they're not familiar with it, they can't see the advantages in using it. It's why I would get a chuckle out of the occasional posts here and on other forums delcaring that object oriented programming is just so much voodoo and you can "simulate" OOP using procedural programming. It's about not seeing the forest for the trees. We tend to evaluate things using our own point of reference, and everything is colored by that. It's the old saying "if all you use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Not to go completely off on a tangent, but I'm seeing a lot of that with Vista. It amazes me the number of technology pundits who are just proactively spreading FUD about the operating system. There are still people who think that it's 64-bit only, or that it won't run 16-bit applications, or that all applications have to be digitally signed. It was the same kind of FUD also surrounding .NET when they were saying that COM was "dead", or that Win32 programs would no longer run under Vista, that only .NET assemblies could be used. Some of those fears were expressed right here on this forum.

So I agree with you, but it's the inherent tendency for most people to resist change. Just like everyone else, some programmers can get in their comfort zone and they're going to resist leaving it, come hell or high water.

------------------
Mike Stefanik
www.catalyst.com
Catalyst Development Corporation

posted January 04, 2007 06:52 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Mike Stefanik:
...some programmers can get in their comfort zone and they're going to resist leaving it, come hell or high water.

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I prefer to think of it as being able to see the wood for the trees.
The objective for me is to provide business solutions to traditional businesses.
Change in the infrastructure is my enemy, because it entails irrecoverable costs.

posted January 04, 2007 07:06 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chris Holbrook:
I prefer to think of it as being able to see the wood for the trees.
The objective for me is to provide business solutions to traditional businesses.
Change in the infrastructure is my enemy, because it entails irrecoverable costs.

---

The two things that are guaranteed in this business is that change is inevitable, and it is rapid. You adapt, or you die. Resisting change because it represents "irrecoverable costs" is like saying that you want to resist the rotation of our planet because nighttime increases the amount of electricity that is used for lighting. Both kinds of resistance are, I'm afraid, equally futile. We are Microsoft of Borg.... (sorry, couldn't resist).

posted January 04, 2007 07:54 PM            

quote:

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We are Microsoft of Borg....

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I really can't see MS staying on top for a whole lot longer. They are big, bloated, and unorganized when compared to other more efficient development houses. We've already seen some very solid Linux based O/Ss that can do pretty much everything the home user wants...Web/eMail/Music/Video, etc. As the younger generation who is growing up with 'Linux-as-a-second-language' begin to move into management positions, I predict we'll see a pretty rapid fall of the MS monopoly.

Wonder who we'll get to hate then?

posted January 04, 2007 08:21 PM            

There's going to also have to be a change in the general mindset of the Linux folks and embrace proprietary drivers. Open source zealotry is really one of their problems. They don't want you to just "buy into" the operating system as a platform, they want to "convert" you to the religion of open source. There's some great open source projects, but there's also a slew of extraordinarily crappy ones (just peruse SourceForge sometime). Just as there is with commercial software. The Linux folks are going to have to accept there's a place for both open source and commercial software; not just one or the other.

Right now, I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about. There's so many Linux distributions and so much discord in the community that they're like crabs in a barrel with the lid off. They're too busy bringing each other down to actually get anywhere in the desktop market.

------------------
Mike Stefanik
www.catalyst.com
Catalyst Development Corporation

posted January 04, 2007 08:39 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Nick Luick:
Does anyone remember Big Blue !!

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Sure, but IBM didn't lose the market. They proactively gave it away to competitors by making extraordinarily stupid decisions in the 1980s. They did things which were arguably good for the personal computing market, but were very bad things for IBM in terms of their bottom line.

And frankly, Microsoft is a whole lot more agile than IBM was. Remember back in 1995 when Gates wrote the "Internet Tidal Wave" and some other internal memos? They basically turned Microsoft around on a dime, refocusing the whole comapany on Internet technologies. Within a few years, they completely dominated the third-party browser and TCP/IP stack market. Windows was turned into the "best way to get on the information superhighway" and all the rest.

It doesn't matter who's "best", or even necessarily who's "first" but rather who's fastest to adapt to the changes in the market and leverage them. Internet Explorer is a great example of that in action. It's not the best browser out there, but it's good enough. It certainly wasn't the first browser. But Microsoft leveraged their dominance in the PC marketplace to make it the dominant browser. Being smart and aggressive in business is just as important as having good (enough) technology.