All this vb6 talk makes me want to mention. http://www.powerbasic.com It's still supported, still being upgraded, and works with every single release of windows from 95 up to 7. Also, it requires no external dlls for the basic runtimes. I.E. if you write a program in powerbasic that doesn't use external dlls, then you won't need to include any in your final exe file. And, as a point of interest, powerbasic had to add a bloat metadirective, just so people would actually believe the programs it produced were written for windows, because they were so small. Here's an example. I need a program to delete email from a pop3 account I only used for verifications. I searched and found one written in visual basic. It was 95K, plus a 1.1MB dll required to execute this simple delete email program. I decided I didn't want that, so wrote my own in powerbasic. Total exe size when complete was only 24K.
Anyone who is serious about modern programming, but wants the simplicity of basic really needs to give powerbasic a look, it can't be beat for it's simplicity. If you buy the console compiler, it's $169, and you have access to all windows functions as long as they're anywhere in the windows dlls, as powerbasic doesn't require you to register com objects before you can use them in your programs. Admittedly, the dlls you need to use need to be aliased and such, but that's only confusing until you figure out how it works, after that, you can use their pbrowser program to find out what the dll calls are in any .dll file, .ocx file, or any com object. If that's not enough, you can access their help system, for discussions about their products, where there's thousands of samples, and folks always willing to assist if you get stuck with anything. I'm telling you folks, it can't be beat for ease of use and completeness, and since it's still being upgraded, supported, and sold, you won't be left out in the cold when ms decides to go to the next new thing. It's pretty amazing that with powerbasic, you can compile a program and have it run on every single release of windows from win95 all the way through windows 7, and with a single small executable file. If so desired, you can restrict it to particular versions of windows if you prefer, but personally, I say why bother. Anyway, I don't work for the company, I'm only a happy user of their products, and have been for nearly 10 years, and the programs I wrote with pb 2.0 still compile and run on pb 5.0 10 years later, that should tell you something about their commitment to usability and compatibility. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
