New competition for WinDev?

[www.microsoft.com]
MS first attempt to establish a RAD tool on the market

MMM i think storm approaching:eek:

Not really, not really.

I wanted to see the Videos. First thing is, you have to install Microsoft Silverlight, the M$ proprietary replacement of Adobe Flash.

And it tells me:
Microsoft Silverlight cannot be used in browsers running in 64 bit mode.
You are running on a browser that may not be fully compatible with Microsoft Silverlight. You can still try to install by clicking below or you can refer to the System Requirements for more information.

M$ Silverlight can't work with M$ 64-bit Internet Explorer.

Nice.

Very good beginner tutorials:
[msdn.microsoft.com]

Hi, no joy. It insists that I install Silverlight for the Videos, no video shown. It says that M$ IE 9 64-bit is probably not compatible with Silverlight. When trying to install Silverlight, it says that exactly the same version of Silverlight is already installed. So, probably I have to switch over to Win7*32 .. so much for basic compatibility of M$ products.

Price. No one knows the price of Lightswitch yet. Prices between 300 US$ and 1000 US$ are mentioned and maybe, there's a price per year, like a subscription ..

No one knows about versions (express, light, professional ..). Products from beta 1 and Beta 2 are incompatible. What will happen to Beta 3 and Beta 4?

Someone brought the idea of 'hosting Lightswitch apps' up. No exe's made?

Still a lot of things in alpha I presume.

Regards, Guenter

Hi Günter,
as I understand it's a light switch RAD attachment for Visual Studio for developers of database development support.
Sure Light Switch is still in beta, but if MS remains there will be a serious alternative to WINDEV.
It would be good for us WINDEV developers that PCSOFT finally wakes up and realizes more quality in WINDEV.

Regards

Thomas

Thomas,

Downloaded LightSwitch about a week ago and then forgot to try it out. Had a look at the videos that you handily put the link to, and yes, they are very good, I'm looking forward to the final release. I found it slightly ironic that there are close to as many training videos for a product still in beta as there are for each version of Windev that's been going for years :-/

Regards

John

Good video training.

[msdn.microsoft.com]


Manfred

Hi
As I see it it is a nice tool but if you want to create real functionality it has to be done with visual studio c# or vb.

only verry basis controls are availeble.I think it is more a dbtool like acces for the internet. None programmers kan make nice things and can hire in a professional ( vs programmer ) that makes nice controls for them

However it can run as a webapp and as a normal app. That is really cool. And documentation like video etc is great it really invites one to take a look at it

But if you are talking about a competing programm, take a look at runrev. Runrev has a laguage that is nearly english an with runrev one can make:
webapps
windows apps
linux apps
and even apps for mobile including iphone.

Allard

Hi Thomas,

Lightswitch generates C# code and is - therefore - part of Visual Studio. If you know C# AND SilverLight very well, Lightswitch MAY BE a good idea for you. But: imho, if you know C# and SilverLight very well then you're not a WinDev (or WebDev) programmer anyway. Changing ANYTHING within or adding ANYTHING to a Lightswitch program after the generation run will require you or your programmers to be C# and SilverLight champions. If you can find such an animal on the job market you'll have to pay a bit more than just a handful of dollars.

Next, you will not be able to use Lightswitch alone. As usual with Visual Studio programming, you will need to buy a bunch of third party add-ons and you will have to integrate them into Lightswitch. Which will ask for some C# skills and a good .NET proficiency.

Similar products to Lightswitch are already on the market - example: Ironspeed [www.ironspeed.com] If you want to use ironspeed, just go ahead. It's the same as to most other RAD generated application. Generation takes a blink, changes take forever.

Others aren't that nice in their comments: [visualstudiomagazine.com] and please, READ the comments down the page ...

Compare that all to WinDev .....

Regards, Guenter

Günter, lightswitch is for Desktop AND Internet. And the language is Visual Basic too.
[blogs.msdn.com].
As I understand the matrix is very flexible lightswitch from Visual Studio Pro

[blogs.msdn.com]

As I understand the matrix is very flexible lightswitch from Visual Studio Pro.
Lightswitch supports desktop and internet. And Visual Basic too.

Hi, RunRev has an eventful history, to say it positively. If you're asking for continuity .. prepare for changes.

[en.wikipedia.org]

Regards, Guenter

LS can VisualBasic too AND is for Desktop/Internet

For me is

Programmers Heaven= WD+open Knowledge Base+really Bug Tracking [[5]]

Quote
Thomas
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dseven/archive/2011/03/08/visual-studio-lightswitch-feature-matrix.aspx

As I understand the matrix is very flexible lightswitch from Visual Studio Pro.
Lightswitch supports desktop and internet. And Visual Basic too.

Hey, you looked into the wrong column if we're talking about Lightswitch. You have to observe column 1. The right column with the many 'Yes's is for Visual Studio in general - not for Lightswitch! Oh yes, you can make an ASP.NET application with Visual Studio - but there's no way to use Lightswitch for that. Regards, Guenter

Silverswitch is good for beginner as it's ,for sure, a newbie product while
WXs have been around for more than a decade.

But silverswitch can't run on Linux, can it?

For comparison, we should pay more attention to the stability issue and
all-in-one functionalities of such.

All I can see, products like powerbuilder, progress and other famous 4gl/5gl
tools are those past tense of their glorious and booming days and nothing much
left that we're talking about such now but WXs are still heading up.

But I suggest pcsoft should provide more video trainings, especially for WB,
as well as Silverswitch's.

King

Ummm....do you mean LightSwitch? As for running on Linux, I'm not sure that WD runs that great on it and although Linux may be ok for server use, I think that most developers enjoy programming on Windows more, (although it's horses for courses, I personally can't stand Linux). I think Visual Studio is probably still heading upwards though, I've heard tell it's quite popular ;-)

The best thing that PCSoft can do is, as I've said before, yawn, is to concentrate on being able to interact FULLY with established standards out in the real world and to provide some proper documentation/videos for people to use. If it wasn't for Guenter's excellent forum that we use today I think most of us would be up s**t creek without a paddle. Forget all this 999996 new features stuff and concentrate on just giving powerful and meaningful updates that provide intergration- (just 9 or 10 would do !) and kill the bugs in the existing programs! Provide a LST for people that speak English would be a good start too !

Rant over :-)

John

At least, I guess, you like WX's also and thanks go to Guenter's contribution
to this website and even WX is not as popular as Visual Studio of what John said.

And at least, I'm liking it (WX) but I still use VS for C#/C++ stuff whenever needed.

King

Günter,

-I mean in the first column of the LS Website Visual Basic and Visual C # is supported

"LS applications are flexible enough to support extensions for templates, data sources, shells, themes, business data types and custom controls. Get extensions from component vendors or develop them yourself using Visual Studio Professional, Premium or Ultimate"
LS I would only use in connection with VS Pro. Even if I had the full flexibility. In the VS Pro with MSDN, LS is automatically included.
No more campaigning for LS. I'll be watching LS!

John,

just my opinion!

Regards

Thomas

King,

Yes, I do actually think that the WinDev product I use most, Mobile, is quite good. It looks good and has some good features on, better in a lot of cases than what I could get with VS only. However, it also has some 'features' that drive me crazy, like the 'SIPVisible' command that can work fine 100 times and then suddenly create an error message!! Eh? Or how commented out code can still be ran, even though I've saved the project or how queries that are linked for example to a list box suddenly stop being recognised at run time even though nothing has changed and I've deleted the .cpl folders. But then two days later will start working again.....I could go on and on. It's these things that I want fixed, not 100000's of new features!! Because here's the sad fact......what happens is I give up trying to code around these problems after having wasted 5 hours pratting around, load up VS and code the whole thing that works in 30 minutes ! Now that really is 10x faster ! But I'd love to code it in WinDev, it does me no favours coding 80% in WinDev and then having to use VS for the other 20%........give us a realible product with decent examples (that work) and documentation / videos. A programming PDF that's well overdue, (and not much help to be honest), and about 12 videos is not what I'd call making an effort !

Thomas,

No , I agree , I'm going to keep an eye on it , of course it is handy that I too subscribe to the MSDN !

Regards

John

John, oh how you're right!

the new hammer is in the Windev 16 books, some new features not described. The Palm features were disabled without warning. I had to remove it completely from my code (I did not want to stay with Windev 15). Hours of work for nothing. And so on.
If I were not in the final phase, I would switch to VS Pro. Once I'm done I'm writing the new version of VS Pro. Except PCSOFT is finally going and presents a stable WINDEV 17 :-)

The conditions would agree: The basis for WINDEV is Visual Studio:-)

Can anyone tell me what else is the best (All-in-one) app so far tool for building windows/mobile/webs?

Let's forget cross-platform issue, just stick to Windows.

As far as I know, being used VS for more than 2 decades, still using it occasionally,
but the deliverable is primitive or I've to buy 3rd party component to complete
the project for my clients then.

King

King,
VS of course must be completed with third parties. But here I see a great advantage over WINDEV. If it's bad I switch to another provider.
In WINDEV I am dependent on the whim of PCSOFT.

The only advantage is the WINDEV is his 5GL language and Hyper File. Unfortunately, the initial high speed of development is slowed down considerably by errors.

Regards

Thomas

Thomas

One thing bothers me quite much is the versioning problem.
WX is downward compatible and not the other way round
meaning that if my client has a WB app server for V12 and now
I'm running WB16 and I can't deploy WB16 apps on WB12 app server.

Worse that all, my client won't pay me for upgrading the server as
he already paid for it and asking me why and what's the benefit!!!

King

Thomas,

I've a similar problem with WD Mobile, in that I've got two apps I need to run on a client's mobile engineer base, all with HD2's. Trouble is, one app is in v14 and one in v15 which means I have to have both versions of the framework on the device.
Why not convert the v14 app to v15, you might ask? The reason being is that the app contains a huge amount of web services, and whenever I add or modify the existing services, WinDev really annoyingly decides to forget that the services exist at all, showing errors for every defined web service and to rectify I have to re-import all the services again, changing any code I've modified, which can run into hours of work and could potentially muck up the whole app, so I'd rather not go through the pain of that.

King:

I've had a lot of joy using Resco third party components. Good quality with lots of examples and docs. And for Desktop/Web I've found DevExpress components to be very good. They can be a bit complicated at first, but are VERY powerful and they've also got lots of examples and videos.

John

Could you point me out the right link(s) for seeing more info of Resco, thx?

It sounds interesting to me.

Thx again

King

King,

a few tips


[www.resco.net]
[www.devexpress.com]
[www.combit.net]

Yep, it's [www.resco.net]

Cheers

John



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/29/2011 04:11PM by Jimbo.

Don't get me wrong people. I love windev and have been using it for about 5 or 6 years now. But if I had to do this project over I would take a really hard look at Alpha 5. Their desktop database app are really easy but their web tool is totally awesome. You end up with and app that will run on a desktop or as a web app with virtually do changes. And development time is quite a bit faster than windev. But I am to old and to tired to transfer my windev project over to alpha. There could be draw backs but I haven't read of any. I am very happy with WinDev except for all of it's quirks and work arounds I have had to do. I have not done a complete project with Alpha 5 so I could be way off base. But from the little time I have had to play around with it, it is really awesome. And it cost a heck of a lot less to boot.

John