Posted by Hans Salvisberg on 2007-06-26 09:10 CET
(In reply to: Re: Want to sell copies of Champ? posted by Christian Klauser on 2007-06-18 17:01 CET)

Please excuse the long delay. >> Absolutely. But I have to emphasize that I have never ever programmed against the WIN32 API. All I know is the .NET base class library. Great! You have my full support. What can I do to help you? As you've found out yourself, the "magic" is mostly smoke and mirrors, plus a few clever tricks and a lot of hard work for actually implementing and documenting a full set of primitives. I don't think your lack of experience with the WIN32 API is a problem, because it doesn't make sense to try to write a new .NET library against an old API that is much harder to work with than what we have now. The challenges are in the details, which will be different under .NET than under WIN32, and I believe you'd be much better off to start from scratch, building on whatever ideas you find useful, but otherwise taking full advantage what .NET has to offer. Your dialog example does look promising indeed. It's too bad that C# doesn't have a preprocessor that would let you hide some of the plumbing, but a project wizard will go a long way to ease the pain. WaitFor<KeyEventArgs>(win.textBox,"KeyDown") is not exactly what you'd want to show to a beginner during the first lesson, but I'm sure this could be wrapped some more for cases with modest requirements. A 100ms delay in the RENDER thread should be enough to allow the MAIN thread to signal its intentions, for all practical purposes.