On 2017/11/15 11:56 PM, Simon Slavin wrote:
You are locking yourself into the Windows system. By all means use
this solution as a prototype but if you ever find yourself saying "I’m
now doing serious programming." do what you can to escape Windows,
Office, and Visual-*. Otherwise you will continue to be a niche
programmer with a very small niche, subject to panics every time your
users upgrade their versions of Windows and Office.
Simon.
While I'm with you on the virtues of multi-platform environments and
would like to urge the OP on in that regard too, I'm going to have to
also nitpick on that statement's accuracy - while it may hold for /some/
Office-VB scripts, for most other Visual-* systems[1] that compile
Windows .exe files, it's simply not true.
An exe you make today will be compatible and still run on the majority
of Windows computers long after chickens grew teeth. Things designed in
the 90's are still used today (I mean I wish people wouldn't use it, but
they do). Never did I lose any sleep past all the hundreds of upgrades
Windows had in that time, or woke up one day to find system X is no
longer functioning (and this has actually happened lots on other
platforms, PHP being the worst - anyone still remember mysql_xxx()
functions [without the i]?).
And please understand me well, I'm not praising Windows for this, quite
the opposite - One of my (and other-people's) main gripes with Windows
is the stupid insistence on being so overly backward compatible that so
much legacy API clunk up the core so that it can never match GUI
intensive apps on other platforms, or use workarounds to allow old apps
that were not made for the current security layers to still function
(I'm looking at you "Windows Virtualization"). If your App was made for
Apple/Android/Linux and it still tried non-conformant things in API
security terms after security upgrades, it would just no longer work
and, at a minimum, require a recompile (and rightly so! that's the
entire point of security upgrades).
So no, I'm not a fan of how Windows does it, BUT, it does mean that it
is extremely backward compatible, and saying that making something
on/for a Windows platform makes you a "niche" programmer or gives you
reason to panic when upgrades happen, is wholly unfair and just not true.
I don't have specific figures now, but I think in terms of desktop
applications, Windows still outrank every other platform 50 to 1 in
sheer volume of available apps and same holds for sheer number of users.
In fact, it's quite horribly banal - the very opposite of a niche.
Cheers,
Ryan
PS: I wish Windows dev teams were as efficient as their marketing teams
- what a great World that would be!
[1] Including but not limited to: VB, VB.Net, Visual C, Visual C++, etc.
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