Tom, Is it Dot Net aware, meaning can it access the Dot Net framework?
-----Original Message----- From: Tom Kingston [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 11:15 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: PowerBASIC Editor / Debugger Accessibility Hey Rick, I've used Power BASIC for years. I just got the new release (V10) on Friday. And they did an overhaul of the IDE interface. It's not much different functionally, but it is a bit funky in some odd ways. Although it's not any big deal. So I've been playing around with it. And it's definitely very accessible. As far as features and framework go? This is probably why PB is not all the rage for most programmers today. It's a very basic (no pun intended) developer without all the fancy bells, whistles, frills and thrills of something like Visual Studio. It's a programming environment for those who want to make every line count. This is why their real customer base is in big critical app development. It was only a year or two ago that they (begrudgingly) put out a forms add-on. I bought it, tried it, and it was actually pretty accessible. But the cool factor wore off pretty quick for me. So, other than that, you're not going to have 14 windows and 12 toolboxes crowding your display with wonderful one size fits all chunks of prefabricated code. It's just an old-school sit down and write the code kind of developer designed for very lean programming instead of the rush to market bloatware we get from most developers these days. But don't get me wrong. Any IDE in the right hands can be the source of a killer app. But a lot of auto-generated code is what can hit us the hardest. And that's another thing I like about Power BASIC. By default all the controls are standard Windows controls rather than gussied up versions that sighted folks tell me they can't even see the difference in while I have to deal with custom controls. So if you don't mind writing code with absolutely no help from your IDE, give it a test drive. That is if they have a demo available. As far as debugging? The debugger works fine. It gives you an error code and a brief description, which usually is all you need. But if you want more information, just open the context menu and you have the option to view that error code in the help window. And you've got the standard options; run to, setting break points, stepping, etc. I haven't tackled writing a Window-Eyes script with it yet. VBScript was too tempting, given all the overhead it handles automatically. But it is on my to-do list. Well, that's not exactly true. I did write a little app using the GWSpeak.dll library a year or so ago. It's just a pipeline of sorts that enables me to send strings to Window-Eyes to speak. Hope this was of some help. Good luck with whatever route you decide to take. Regards, Tom ----- Original Message ----- From: "RicksPlace" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 5:21 AM Subject: PowerBASIC Editor / Debugger Accessibility Hi: I saw GW's script for Power Basic on AppCentral. I am guessing from what i read about it's power for COM that someone out there has likely used it or is using it. Can you tell me a little about Accessibility of the IDE and features? Has anyone developed a script in PowerBASIC and used Windows and, or, MSAA Events within their script? Have you hit anything that is not very accessible in any of the PowerBasic features or framework? Rick USA
