Re: Codegear should really read this

I read part one when it came out and was waiting for part two to see where
he was going. Basically he's frustrated with windows to the point of
seriously looking elsewhere. To that end I can relate even if he doesn't
back up his rant all that well.

The first real gotcha that I ran into was with WMF and EMF rendering back
with Win98.

The product I was working on needed to use PCL files that were converted to
WMF to use as report background images, mortgage forms that were created in
another app. We had bought a product to do the conversion since it also
handled converting fonts and graphics, and my own PCL rendering routines
never advanced to that point. We mainly needed the WMFs in access reports,
and that worked fine, the problem came in with any other in house utility
app that needed to display them. Delphi's WMF/EMF support is a direct
wrapping of the win32 api calls, makes sense enough its built into windows,
except its broke. The api doesn't handle margin/padding correctly and our
forms had state specific margins varying per page. In Access it worked fine
because the Office team wrote there own WMF/EMF renderer, but it never got
back into the api. I searched and demoed all kinds of third party image
libraries but no one except ACDSee had bothered to write their own routine,
and ACDSee wasn't licensing theirs. Things like this to me should be fixed,
the file has records that are defining a margin, but the renderer ignores
them and therefore isn't complying with the file spec, a bug that should
have been fixed years ago.

I've tested this in every version of windows since and its still broken, not
sure on Vista though but I think it was. There's been others, but this one
still annoys me. And while I understand the market reasons for MS doing this
it still frustrated me as a developer. Ironically its caught up with them as
more and more people start looking for third party solutions either by
choice or because they were forced to.

DD


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: newbe about API
    ... Emne: Re: newbe about API ... > I found all these API-CALL strings are finally compiled to ... more than that...and Windows simply takes this to an extreme that this ... DLL, when a weak point is found (which, with Microsoft, is something ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: In the Shallow End
    ... When a document claims how an API is supposed to be used and then gives the user examples that actually work, ... Vague in your instance means you have no context to VMS or UNIX of that era. ... Windows offers lots of this stuff. ... That's why Apple had to dump a whole paradigm to plunge ahead and take the lead. ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Re: a pre-beginners question: what is the pros and cons of .net, compared to ++
    ... as the windows forms architecture wraps a number of activex ... and retains backwards compatibility with both COM and the classic Win32 api. ... C++ cannot inherently do video capture either, since you have to import COM. ... Outlook or Word or IM programs, each of which would run in managed code ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.general)
  • Re: Interpreting a BAS module
    ... unicode and ansi strings. ... applications make calls out to Windows to ask it to do something (e.g. ... you have to utilize an API that is designed to ... AddressOf is also used in subclassing. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: WMF vulnerability was a deliberate backdoor?
    ... > was a deliberate backdoor put into all of Microsoft's recent editions of Windows. ... This ABORTPROC issues has been in Windows for many, ... allowed SETABORTPROC when the stream is backed solely by a *file* stream ... Whether this is a good idea or not, it's part of a published API to the ...
    (Bugtraq)