Printing
When I try to print my outline and select "print to a file", I am asked for a file name but no path name. Life Balance then freezes.
When I try to print my outline and select "print to a file", I am asked for a file name but no path name. Life Balance then freezes.
RE: Printing
Hi Lloyd,
Unfortunately the Print to File Output File Name dialog is not under our direct control; I agree that it is lame but it's not clear what we can do to fix it. However, I am surprised that Life Balance is freezing; that doesn't happen here when I try a print to file. Are you sure you're giving it enough time to complete? Is it possible that you're running on Windows 98? The Microsoft .NET 1.0 Framework has several printing bugs on Windows 98.
Hope this helps and let me know if you have any further questions.
Scott
The Other Llama
RE: Printing
It's Windows XP. I tried it again and this time it worked. .NET is a relatively immature environment, so why did you not develop in C or VB?
RE: Printing
Because .NET is the way of the future - at least on Windows platforms.
Using VB6 would be painting oneself into a corner.
And there is cross platform C++ code in there too :)
Murph
RE: Printing
Hi Lloyd,
Just to elaborate a bit on Murph's answer, as an example, Fortran77 is a mature environment, but nobody is seriously using it for developing Windows GUI applications.
The .NET Framework is somewhat independent of the underlying programming language. As Murph noted, the core of Life Balance is platform independent (Palm, Macintosh, Windows) C++ code. The Windows UI is a layer on top of that using .NET with C#. Microsoft has done a pretty decent job on C# itself, combining some of the best features of C++ and VB, though it still runs relatively slow, but that's a generic problem with JIT compiled languages (c.f. Java).
The .NET Framework is where I feel like they've been a little sloppy, though it is a pretty enormous bite that they're trying to chew here. There are a number of bugs that we've had to work around (particularly with printing) but even so, it's still been very productive. I feel like we've produced better code faster for Windows with Visual Studio .NET than we could have with any other tool, even with the fairly steep learning curve.
The other advantage of .NET is that we're well poised to move to other Windows-related platforms, particularly Windows CE. Also we have some other groupware ideas where a client-server model might make sense and I think we could again leverage what we've already done with .NET.
Finally, Microsoft seems fairly committed to maturing .NET. The 1.1 Framework has fixed a number of bugs and Visual Studio .NET 2003 is an improvement over 2002.
Well, I've said more than I originally intended to, so I better get back to work....
Scott
The Other Llama