Discussions

Better documented than MSDN? Really!?

I have been working on and off with windows shell programming and it is a slog for me making heads or tails of the entire mess. Linking a contextmenu to a namespace extension requires using GetUIObjectOf and IQueryAssociations and passing the right contents to AssocCreateForClasses. And I still cannot figure out how copy/paste works in a NSE. Which got me looking down the trail of IContextMenuCB and the XP era CDefFolderMenu_Create2 and I have found absolutely nothing on that interface.

In the wndows api space on MSDN it is very rare that you see sample code that illustrates the APIs.

The windows desktop forums are not places where you can get good broad answers to a question.

Copy paste between apps is already pretty powerful via the OLE clipboard. What would you like it to do that you can't get it to do currently?

what about all of your WPF bindings being copy and pasteable between apps?  have a standard XML format for what is copied to the clipboard.

PHP is entirely managed and is "isolated", and yet PHP websites get hacked all the time, leading to the customer data being stolen.

well, then do a better job at it. I am not convinced you cannot have a virus free system.  for example, a system should always be talking to the OS producer, making sure that all of the binaries match what the producer installed on the system.

1 hour ago, evildictait​or wrote

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Look up Singularity or Cosmos. But be aware that managed code != no security vulnerabilities (look at the huge raft of security issues Java or Android apps has had for instance)

 

I should not say managed code since it does not imply what I am thinking. More just a higher order framework that includes garbage collection and goes a long way in enabling the programmer to get the end result to the user. Like in C# and .NET the programmer is multiple times more productive than with COM and C++.  The OS should have such a framework as its core.

1 hour ago, JoshRoss wrote

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Like Windows 7? Nothing competes with Windows better than Windows.

well, I am thinking about an OS based on managed code. Really strong siloing of apps so no such thing as a virus.  Much better problem determination features, where I can freeze the system and examine in depth what a process is doing.  My superior OS would be well documented with a lot of sample code for every interface.  I am sure W8 is better, but W7 is very slow to start. You have to do better at that.  The windows shell, at least from a programmer's perspective could be a lot better. Copy/paste between apps is so useful, you have to be able to do a lot more with that. IE could be much better - save everything I browse to, enable me to skip advertisements in videos. Favorites are nice, but do you really need superior hierarchical organizational skills to know how to store a favorite so you can find it at a later time?

I think the large sales figures are a testament to the huge market opportunity for a desktop OS that can compete with Windows.

I liked it a lot. Reminds me for some reason of back in the day when there was new music being released all the time. And new software.

1 hour ago, exoteric wrote

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That's an absurd conclusion. Depending on language compexity and optimizations applied, the compilation-time can vary wildly. One of the Go compilers can compile large code bases in less than a second.

 

I do not know other compilers. Was just figuring that the compilier would be the flagship app of a language and a lot of effort would be put into making it run well. And my recent experience using visual C++ is it is a bit shabby, kind of like the language and the compiler have been hacked together over the years. Which would be fine if I had an alternative. But C# does not handle structs very well and Microsoft says windows shell code should be written in C++.

1 minute ago, Sven Groot wrote

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Nice theory, except the C# compiler is written in C++ too (Mono's C# compiler is written in C#, but MS.Net's isn't).

what was Anders talking about last year when describing the data structures used in the Roselyn project?  Where they did not have to recreate the entire parse tree or whatever it was called for every source code change. I recall him saying they had redone the entire compiler.

10 minutes ago, Sven Groot wrote

Whether managed or native is faster has no simple answer. With native code, it is possible to perform more optimizations so it is possible to write faster code than with managed. However, in practice it may be require extremely complex and hard to maintain code to actually beat managed code. 

In my C++ code all strings are in std::wstring and I am making a lot of use of unique_ptr<class>. And since I do a lot of function calls which return these types, there must be a lot of constructors and destructors being called.  Compared to C# simply returning a reference.