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Oddly, there has been a stream of APIs since then too, yet you can get by writing in the old ones no problem!
by 72deluxe 11y ago
Oddly, there has been a stream of APIs since then too, yet you can get by writing in the old ones no problem!
- krylon 11y agoAs a software user, I appreciate that. But having worked on a Win32 application for two years, I am glad I will never again have to touch that pile of poo. At the time it was created, Win32 might have been a nice API, given the underpowered machines it was designed to run on. But compared to building GUIs on a POSIX-ish system using Gtk+, it was an incredible pain. I can understand why many Windows developers were so happy to embrace .Net; one might like it or dislike it, but it is a huge improvement on Win32. (As for MFC/AFX, I only had the most fleeting contact with it, so I cannot say for sure.)
- 72deluxe 11y agoYes I can understand why .Net was so embraced by developers. Underneath it calls Win32 for you anyway I presume, so it's a nicer wrapper. Kind of like using wxWidgets on Windows is nicer than writing Win32 calls! I have done some MFC and did not enjoy it, despite similarities in my mind to wxWidgets. I see C++ jobs here in the UK want MFC experience, which saddens me as it means that desktop development for Windows in C++ is either MFC or Borland's rotting VCL. I can really see why C# and .Net took off in the face of that.