[GUI] CGA Proposal

[Krasimir Angelov]

--- Axel Simon <A.Simon@kent.ac.uk> wrote:
> The question is whether people would consider GUIs
> written
> with MFC as the native user interface. Do C# and
> Visual Basic
> build on MFC or are they restricted to plain Win32?

The Microsoft Office and most of others Microsoft and
third party software products are written using MFC. I
think that the answer to your first question is True.
The .NET and Visual Basic uses its own GUI libraries
which are independent of MFC. The trouble here is that
MFC is written in C++ and only for C++. This makes
difficult to use it from VB or .NET. But yet the .NET
and VB are both based on comctl32.dll and provides
many extensions like dockable toolbars.
The same is true for VCL and CLX in Delphi.

> Another example where you are quite deliberate is
> when
> you specify the About dialog box for which no common
> dialog exists on Gnome or Windows. I don't want to
> be
> too picky about that since the programmer does not
> have to use
> them, but I am picky if the user has to use them (as
> is
> the case with toolbars).

The About dialog for Gnome is implemented in
libgnomeui and it is recomended to use it.

> >  The
> > standard menus in Windows cannot display bitmaps
> but
> > there exists many MFC extension which provides the
> > this feature (Stingray, Dundas and other
> toolkits).
> 
> Yes, and there is an extension to support resizable
> dialogs.
> But that all is a breach, I think.

The bitmap menus are not provided from MFC and
comctl32.dll but many applications uses bitmap menus.
Examples: Microsoft Office, Micosoft Visual Studio,
Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer ... Are they
violate the platform guidelines?

> What do you mean by bitmap menus? I assume those are
> menu items with a smaller version of the tool bar
> icons to the
> left of them, right?!

Exactly. Maybe the name is not too expressive. Do you
have better name?

Krasimir

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