Randy C
June 17th, 1999, 09:24 AM
After painstakingly upgrading from VC5 to VC6, I'm beginning to think the smartest thing I did was to clone my HD before starting, so I could go back. I'm running Win 95, OEM release w/FAT32, on a 200MHz pentium machine with about 80M or Ram, and plenty of hard drive space. But I'm really angry about the way the installation seems to have changed my whole system, and some of the results I've seen re-building perfectly stable projects. I'm going to mention some of these here because I'm really thinking of going back via my previous HD clone. Before I dump the time I invested though, I'm open to comments and/or arguments to the contrary. Maybe the resulting dialog will be helpful to others as well. Incidently, I did immediately apply Service Pack 3, before even trying the installation.
System problems....
1. I can see that installation has altered the way my system displays graphical objects and ICONs, and as usual, the difference includes a slowdown. I can see it when I open directory trees in explorer, and you can actualy see the blank space open up, and the list get filled in. Before, the tree node would just open, and instantly display the contents.
2. Right from the start, the installation complained that I might not have room for a full installation in the system registry, because it apparently has a 64K limit. Hard to believe there are still 64K limits in windows, but that's life. I was able to install VC6, Visual Basic6, but by the time I got to try to install Visual Java, I was having registry problems. Multiple passes of regclean, and un-installing several peices of un-needed applications had absolutely no affect. Microsoft's suggestion on their web sites is to re-install all system software with shorter path names. A little late for that advice I'm afraid.
Actual Developer Studio Dissapointments...
1. The promissed ability to compile smaller code did not pan out. Most of my projects compiled about the same size or in some cases larger. And in some cases, optimizations had to be backed off, because the resulting RELEASE build would not run correctly. Yes, full conversions and re-builds were done in all cases.
2. I used to be able to highlight a function, and pull down help would take me right to the list of related subjects, and I could quickly get what I needed. Now, I have to wade through the MSDN library using the very "severely" connected Explorer 4.01 browser. This also means either swapping CDs around, clobbering another few hundred Meg on my HD, or accessing the help files over the internet. In no case is it as robust as the more standard windows HELP methodology used in VC5.
3. One project that used the multimedia library actually complained (Warnings only) about non standard C++ constructs in the related microsoft header files! Hey I didn't write these header files! Why do they insist on continually " fixing things that ain't broke"!
4. While the IDE seems to provide more automatic popup information, I don't see where the wizards are really any better. There are still loads of bona-fide MFC classes that you can't get to from the wizards, and you still have to "hand" tweak to do simple things like RANGE macros to handle multiple controls with one handler.
5. Minor point, but I thought this isntallation would let me develop VB, VC++, and VJ apps from the same IDE. But this does not really seem to be the case. They all seem to still be stand alone environments. Besides, I'm not really sure using microsoft tools to develop Java is a good idea anyway.
So anyway....
Before I dump my invested time, I'm open to thoughts. At this point, the installation seems to be more of a nuisance and drain on my systems resources then it's worth. So if there are great and wonderful benefits I'll be missing by going back to VC5, I'l love to hear about them!
--Randy C
* * * Second star to the Right!
System problems....
1. I can see that installation has altered the way my system displays graphical objects and ICONs, and as usual, the difference includes a slowdown. I can see it when I open directory trees in explorer, and you can actualy see the blank space open up, and the list get filled in. Before, the tree node would just open, and instantly display the contents.
2. Right from the start, the installation complained that I might not have room for a full installation in the system registry, because it apparently has a 64K limit. Hard to believe there are still 64K limits in windows, but that's life. I was able to install VC6, Visual Basic6, but by the time I got to try to install Visual Java, I was having registry problems. Multiple passes of regclean, and un-installing several peices of un-needed applications had absolutely no affect. Microsoft's suggestion on their web sites is to re-install all system software with shorter path names. A little late for that advice I'm afraid.
Actual Developer Studio Dissapointments...
1. The promissed ability to compile smaller code did not pan out. Most of my projects compiled about the same size or in some cases larger. And in some cases, optimizations had to be backed off, because the resulting RELEASE build would not run correctly. Yes, full conversions and re-builds were done in all cases.
2. I used to be able to highlight a function, and pull down help would take me right to the list of related subjects, and I could quickly get what I needed. Now, I have to wade through the MSDN library using the very "severely" connected Explorer 4.01 browser. This also means either swapping CDs around, clobbering another few hundred Meg on my HD, or accessing the help files over the internet. In no case is it as robust as the more standard windows HELP methodology used in VC5.
3. One project that used the multimedia library actually complained (Warnings only) about non standard C++ constructs in the related microsoft header files! Hey I didn't write these header files! Why do they insist on continually " fixing things that ain't broke"!
4. While the IDE seems to provide more automatic popup information, I don't see where the wizards are really any better. There are still loads of bona-fide MFC classes that you can't get to from the wizards, and you still have to "hand" tweak to do simple things like RANGE macros to handle multiple controls with one handler.
5. Minor point, but I thought this isntallation would let me develop VB, VC++, and VJ apps from the same IDE. But this does not really seem to be the case. They all seem to still be stand alone environments. Besides, I'm not really sure using microsoft tools to develop Java is a good idea anyway.
So anyway....
Before I dump my invested time, I'm open to thoughts. At this point, the installation seems to be more of a nuisance and drain on my systems resources then it's worth. So if there are great and wonderful benefits I'll be missing by going back to VC5, I'l love to hear about them!
--Randy C
* * * Second star to the Right!