Hi Art,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Thanks Steve;
I've already downloaded the tutorial and it is incomplete. If I
remember correctly, it is replicated in CPAN and JEB. So they have
been tried also. The material in JEB, dada, and CPAN which represents
each of the GUI modules is in similar fashion incomplete, so that has
also been tried. The examples contain deprecated features (see below)
although this group and others have indicated that this may be
addressed and solved in the future.
Anyplace that I've missed? I have tried www.bribes.org and
ActiveState to see if they have some information, and I have used
GOOGLE. No luck.
art
I've found http://perlmonks.com/ to be a helpful resource in the past.
There are a lot of number of great perl/win32 hackers haunting the
place, although sometimes you have to be fairly patient waiting for
feedback.
It is best to post specific questions (as in:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html).
So, sigh, where do I get documentation and/or how do I help? Am I
missing something (two weeks is really not a long time to learn
language and GUI)?
Two weeks may be "enough" time, I suppose, for someone to learn perl who
is already familiar with the technologies perl is based around
(awk/sed/vi, Unix shells, POSIX systems) and will recognize the many
idioms perl shares with these. For me it was more like two years,
coming from a more microsoftie programming background... but hopefully
YMMV :-)
On the other hand, two weeks to learn perl *and* then jumping right into
perl/win32? That seems like an ambitious track, again, unless you
happen to already know quite a bit about the Win32 API and will
recognize the many idioms perl's Win32 libraries shares with it :-)
Let's take an example.
Yes, lets. Specifics are always better than rants :-)
...I wanted a ListBox with a scroll bar and a
title/caption/name, or whatever. I used attributes I discovered from
GUI.pm for the scroll bar (-autovscroll and -vscroll) and I used
attributes which really did work for a window (-caption, -title,
-name) for a title, and none of it worked.
"Or whatever"? If you can be more explicit about the question you have
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#explicit folks can
give you much more practical advice.
or, Quote from: "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" (linked above):
How *not* to ask a question:
Q: My {program, configuration, SQL statement} doesn't work
A: This is not a question, and I'm not interested in playing Twenty
Questions to pry your actual question out of you — I have better things
to do. On seeing something like this, my reaction is normally of one of
the following:
- do you have anything else to add to that?
- oh, that's too bad, I hope you get it fixed.
- and this has exactly what to do with me?
Eric's sarcasrm (and anti-windows streak) aside, the point is, when you
say things like "it doesn't work" and "none of it worked" it's much
easier for people to help you if you describe exactly you did (as in,
post the actual code), exactly what result you expected ("I thought this
would draw a window-like thingy wrapped around my listbox", and what you
observed "but all I got was the same old unadorned listbox, with no
title and no little minimize, maximize and close buttons in the corner".
Because if the definition of "works" in your mind and the developer's
was the same, then the code would be perfectly intuitive to all who
tried using it and you wouldn't need to post that the API that is
"working" fine for others doesn't work for you. The fact is API's
seldom work the way every user expects them to, most often because all
the users expect different features to be optimized, and sometimes
because the developers are so close to the code, they don't think about
the problems of the majority of the devlopers who are their users. Most
likely the end result you're looking for is perfectly attainable, but
trying to use the API the way you *assumed* it should work, rather than
the way the designers thought it should work. Either way, once you can
effectively communicate exactly what you're trying to accomplish, people
will be more than happy to show you how to accomplish that. IOW,
Describe the goal, not the step:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal
...But there was an example
with a deprecated feature (-style =>), and it did work. So now I'm
successful using a deprecated feature but have no place to turn when
the feature turns off.
But, how do I find out how to use it? I've read, looked at,
downloaded all the documentation from www.dada.it, www.cpan.org,
www.perl.org, www.perl.com, and, well, I guess others. The
documentation is not complete!
Why not to claim you've found a bug (even in the docs)
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#id3001405
hth,
-dave
