Hot answers tagged windows
45
Visual Studio Express is a set of freeware integrated development environments (IDE) developed by Microsoft that are lightweight versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio product line.
A comparison is available here.
If you are a student you may want to take a look at DreamSpark.
39
A service runs in the background, even if no-one is signed on to the machine. Anything you can imagine wanting to do without relying on a person to start an app and click a button is a good candidate for a service. For example, monitoring a folder and whenever a file is written to it, process it in some way. Any "server" you can think of - web server, ftp ...
39
Mainly security reasons.
As I understand it, when a windows service creates GUI controls such as a MessageBox, they were normally only seen in the session that the services runs in ie Session 0 which also used to be the first user logged on locally or by someone logging on using mstsc /admin. Hence this user would see these controls and could interact with ...
37
Visual Studio C++ Express is free. It's a world-class IDE bundled with Microsoft's C and C++ compilers. There are some non-standard extensions provided by Microsoft's compilers, but you can write completely standards-compliant code, too. There are no limitations on selling applications created with the Express edition commercially, although there are certain ...
36
Computers are not physical monolithical entities anymore, use virtual machines !
Your developers should be able to access different work environments as they need, and virtual machines are the perfect way to do so, you can :
keep a legacy environnement easily accessible.
have multiple, independent environments (ex: 1 environment per client)
have test ...
25
Some pointers:
Filesystem case sensitivity
If your file is called HelloWorld.php this:
include "helloworld.php";
is legit on Windows and will work. But Linux filenames are case sensitive, you can have files called HelloWorld.php, helloworld.php, hEllOwOrlD.php in the same directory. So you should develop on Windows as if you were developing on a case ...
23
The latest .NET frameworks will not run on windows XP, nor would Visual Studio 2011 be a supported option (it will probably work, but if you have problems, you are on your own).
You will not be able to create any metro applications as WinRT will also not be part of XP, ever (there is no way MS would backport a whole new OS API to an unsupported OS).
21
Interactive services are possible, but the service model is that of a process that runs independently of any user. They are designed to be run unattended and therefore shouldn't need a GUI.
If you need to interact with the service the page I've linked to recommends creating a separate GUI application that communicates with the service through interprocess ...
20
An installer always makes sense, if deployment requires anything more complicated than copying the relevant file(s) to some folder and running the EXE. If there are additional steps that need to be taken to set the product up properly, there's two ways to go about it.
You can write out a list for someone to follow. Humans being humans, someone's bound to ...
19
I imagine one of the reasons for that is that Windows sells at a much higher volume. Every Windows PC needs to buy the OS (ignoring piracy for the sake of argument). Not even every Windows-based developer (nevermind regular users) needs something like a control library.
Operating system pricing also has to be careful to not price itself out of existence.
...
19
You pretty much can't. Any pirate group who wants to crack your software will, for fun, and then give it to everyone else and there is nothing you can do. Microsoft can't keep Windows off torrent sites, and the UK government can't stop people visiting The Pirate Bay.
There's a reason that the new wisdom in many creative circles is to accept piracy and use ...
18
Bill Gates programmed part of Microsoft BASIC, which was Microsoft's first product, but by the time of Windows 1.0 Microsoft was already quite a big multinational company and I doubt that Bill was doing much programming. Wikipedia is unclear on the subject:
Gates's role at Microsoft for most of its history was primarily a management and executive role. ...
18
Also are there any pros and cons of using any of them?
Registry:
+ Relatively standard in the Windows environment.
+ Generally good support from installers, etc.
- Platform specific API, if you ever want to port your application.
- Not particularly human readable.
INI Files:
+ Simple format.
+ Portable.
+ Human readable.
- May be difficult to ...
17
Simple: Qt is a fantastic comprensive and elegant framework for coding GUI apps (on any platform). MFC is a hideous and obsolete pile of junk which no-one developing new code should contemplate using at all.
Qt's LGPL might be an obstacle for some commercial users, but they can always pay for a full commercial license.
17
I went through the same deliberations and ended up installing Ubuntu through Wubi. It's a painless install and easily removable through "Add or Remove Programs" if you decide it's not for you. My choice was largely motivated by also wanting to gain more exposure bit more about the Linux side of things. Without that, I would have developed on Windows easily ...
17
C#
I recommend C# as the language to learn.
The syntax is C-like, which will help you get started.
The language is object-oriented, and it's good to learn that way of thinking.
Visual Studio Express is a free download, so it doesn't cost much to start.
There are lots of open source projects in C# to look at and learn from.
It's applicable to web-sites ...
17
From my experiences a lot of people at these conferences are not paying for them out-out-pocket, it's usually a company event/bonus/reward of some sort (especially the Microsoft ones). So, knowing that most of your audience is probably going to be sponsored by a company and not an individual expense, you can generally get away with jacking up the price a ...
15
A compiler and a useful shell.
Clarification based on the comments:
I was unclear, I should have written C/C++ compiler. Compilers for C# or Fortran doesn't count, as much of the tools and libraries you need requires a C or C++ compiler. It used to be really bad, where you could not build C extensions for Python with another compiler than Microsofts, ...
15
I think you may be looking at the wrong sector if you believe there is no demand for these skills anymore. If you are in the US, I'm sure you would be able to get a job with a DoD (Department Of Defense) contractor or the US Cyber Command
That being said, I agree with Gratzy, after 10 years experience in a technology, a single project in another technology ...
15
Windows 8 isn't even commercially available yet. If you upgrade now, it might be to a beta of questionable stability with features that may or may not make the final cut.
If you can afford it: set up an isolated test developer machine and upgrade that one. Then let all the developers play with it now and then to get used to it and find all the little ...
15
I'd go with INI files, they are the more human friendly option:
[window]
width = 600
height = 350
position.x = 400
position.y = 200
[paths]
path1 = "/some/random/path/"
path2 = "/some/other/random/path/"
[user]
name = "Yannis"
preference = "INI"
XML might be a good option, but it can't beat INIs' simplicity and elegance:
...
14
The recommendation (even from Microsoft) is to leave it ON, and also to run your IDE unelevated whenever is possible.
First of all, it let the programmer to live with the same "annoyances" a real world user will have (if you don't know it, would you program correctly around it?).
Then, disabling UAC and working as an administrator is as bad as in Unix to ...
14
For me, a company's high regard for MS certs is the employer version of a "code smell". In other words, it's a fairly clear indicator that the company is not very good at evaluating a programmer's real abilities. The certification exams tend to focus on the minutiae of programming tasks; they're the programming equivalent of evaluating an architect by ...
14
This is my recommendation.
Use MSDN
I started with this site: wpftutorial
Learn MVVM pattern. This is a good article.
There are a few MVVM frameworks. This question may help you to choose one.
14
While I'm tempted to just link to Google, see this quote:
We use almost entirely C, C++, and C#
for Windows. Some areas of code are
hand tuned/hand written assembly.
ryan Ryan Waite - Product Unit Manager
- Windows HPC
There used to be a Sun backed Java operating system project called (not surpresinly) JavaOS. I wouldn't be surprised if ...
14
Nope, it's all Windows 8 unfortunately. A reason is the hypervisor in Windows 8 is used to emulate or virtualise Windows phone 8 machines. That and marketing of course.
Edit:
AS for developers using Windows 8, I use it on all my laptops now and like it. I run Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 under it with no issues.
13
As far as I'm aware this harks back to the days of typewriters.
\r is carriage return, which is what moves where you are typing on the page back to the left (or right if that is your culture)
\n is new line, which moves your paper up a line.
Doing only one of these on a typewriter would put you in the wrong place to start writing a new line of text.
When ...
12
What I like to do is save the last size and position of the application window (at app shutdown) as a user setting. Then when the application is restarted I restore the last used size and position.
If you do this, be careful of using the spurious settings you'll get if the app is minimized at the time it is shut down (e.g. by a forced shutdown).
If I ...
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