Re: Basic

"Rick Rothstein" <rickNOSPAMnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:tOadneRQr5dgLE_fRVn-hw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> Access to the [RealBasic] printer is via a Class, not a
> built-in object, and that Class comes with a lot of "extras"
> over VB's object.

Yes. I quite liked the printer stuff in RealBasic 5.5 (which I downloaded
some time ago when they were offering it free to VB users - in fact to
everybody!). It has its limitations of course (as do many things in many
different languages) but it looked quite nice to me (at least during the
limited time that I played around with RB). I particularly liked the fact
that you could fairly easily save the currently selected printer and its
settings and could just as easily load them back in again so that the user
is presented with a dialog containing whatever he chose before. In other
words, it would be possible to fairly easily do the same job that programs
like Microsoft Word do, where when you load a document and select print the
print dialog comes up with whatever prionter and settings you used the last
time you printed that document. On ething that i found difficult
(impossible, in my view) to do with a "bog standard" RB 5.5 was print
rotated text (a fairly trivial matter in Visual Basic). However, there is a
third party developer that produces an "add a lot of things" add in and one
of the things it does is to allow you to easily get at the RB printer's
device context, which makes it just as easy to do rotated text as it is in
VB. When I mentioned such a thing in answer to a question on the RB
newsgroup I got an email from somebody who I think was from the RB
development team asking me to email him my sample code which did the
"rotated text" stuff in RB, which I did. Hopefully, that might have prompted
them to include access to the printer's hDC as standard in RB 2005, buit I
don't know whether they did so. If they did, it would certainly make a very
useful printer object (although it really isn't an object in RB of course)
very much more useful.

Overall, I was quite impressed with RB. I didn't mind the large size exec
files at all. In fact I prefer them to the alternative (as in VB) of having
a very small exe which itself relies on a large runtime file (which can
sometimes cause incompatibility problems).

One thing that did bother me quite a lot about RB 5.5 though was its speed
(or rather its lack of speed!). Okay, many programs that you write are often
"user bound" anyway, and speed is then not an issue, but in other cases you
want really fast code execution, and RB 5.5 really falls down in that
respect. I don't know whether RB 2005 improves on RB 5.5 in that respect,
but I hope it does.

In the end, after trying RB 5.5 for just a very short period, I decided to
stick with Visual Basic. After all, as the saying goes, "You're better off
with the devil you know" (or something like that!).

If Micro$haft ever makes it difficult to continue to work with VB6 though
(for example, if VB6 apps start to fail to run properly on later versions of
Windows) then I'll definitely be ditching it. I have no intention whatsoever
of ever using that .NET stuff, and so I'll definitely give Real Basic
another look if Micro$haft start messing around!

Mike



.

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