Daily Archives: August 24, 2007

microsoft, software development, windows

MFC not dead – “massive update” planned

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Herb Sutter refers to a comment by Bill Dunlap, a product manager for Visual C++, on the future of MFC:

MFC – we are working on a huge update to MFC that should knock your socks off.  I can’t tell you too much right now, but this is closer than you might thing <g>.

Intriguing, since with ATL and then the whole .NET thing, including managed C++ and C++/CLI, I’d assumed that MFC was all-but deprecated.

I can see the value of this for maintaining existing projects, but for new ones? I like this comment by Dan Shappir:

The only reason I can see for doing significant UI development in C++ is for cross-platform support, and in that case I would probably choose Qt.

Actually I can think of a few other reasons, such as performance and compatibility with older versions of Windows, but then again why not use Delphi?

Talking of Delphi, it’s interesting that according to Shappir’s post referenced above, Microsoft’s Visual C++ team had similar feedback to Borland/Codegear:

Damien Watkins, a Program Manager on the Visual C++ team, stated quite frankly that the feedback they have received from C++ developers is that they prefer to use C# for developing managed code for .NET. So what is the new positioning for C++? Apparently it’s:

  • A strong emphasis on developing unmanaged, native applications
  • Tool for achieving interop between existing native code and new managed code

I guess this ties in with renewed investment in MFC.

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internet, microsoft, web authoring

27 steps to download 2 documents – what happened to usability?

Robert Flaming has posted details of the 27 steps it took him to sign up for the Windows Installer 4.5 beta, though in the end he was only able to download two Word documents.

Perhaps it is not quite as bad as it sounds – several steps to get past IE’s download warning, for example – but even so, it is a neat illustration of the torture sometimes inflicted on users who want to accomplish a rather simple task.

How many potential applicants will give up part way through? Quite a lot, I’d have thought. Then again, perhaps this is a test of suitability for the intricate and confusing world of the Windows Installer.

windows

Tip of the day: Robocopy is in Vista

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What’s Robocopy? It’s a command-line utility that is part of the resource kit for earlier versions of Windows (so non-Vista users are not left out). It should be called “Sane copy”, because by and large it does the obvious thing, whereas most copy utilities do the non-obvious thing. For example, let’s say you have a directory full of files on your desktop PC, and you want to back them up to another drive. So far, nothing special. A few days later, you want to do the same thing again. Most copy utilities will start asking questions about whether you want to merge folders, overwrite files, and so on. Going through this file by file is impossibly tedious, so you’ll probably ask for the whole lot to be overwritten. Now your very smart computer churns away (if there is a lot to copy) replacing perfectly good existing files with new copies, for the sake of just a few files that have actually changed. What you really want is to copy only those files that have been changed or added.

Enter Robocopy. Open a command prompt and type:

robocopy c:\mysourcedir d:\mytargetdir /e

The /e switch asks for all subdirectories to be copied, even if they are empty. Robocopy will only copy the changed files, and gives you a report showing how many files were copied and how many were skipped.

There is one possible flaw in this arrangement. If you deleted a file from the source folder, then copy it over an existing backup, the target folder will still contain the old file. This might not be what you want, especially if you are a developer and this is source code. Old files hanging around are a bad idea. Robocopy has an answer for this too:

robocopy c:\mysourcedir d:\mytargetdir /mir

This switch asks for targetdir to be a mirror of sourcedir, which means files in the target which no longer exist in the source will be deleted. No fuss. Obviously this presumes that you want them deleted. Disclaimer: don’t blame me if this is not the case.

If you can’t hack the command line, there’s a Robocopy GUI you can download. Follow the link and download the UtilitySpotlight2006 exe at the top of the page. This is a geeky GUI but has some neat time-saving features.

For those with a lot of files to back up – like, say, a 300GB media library – Robocopy or an equivalent is a huge time-saver. It’s actually got a host of additional features that I haven’t mentioned here – why not type:

robocopy /?

and take a look.

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