Re: A letter to Microsoft

You need to quit holding back and tell us what you really
think. Reading between the lines, I agree with part of your
message.

What I disagree with is on your assessment "Borland"'
(Codegear's) response to the situation. While they sipped
the koolaid, to their credit they paid attention to what
developers were actually doing and "refocused" on native
development.

My hope is that they'll continue development of native
options, and also keep some options open for us to deploy
our source libraries in .Net and (hopefully) other ways.

Unlike MS, who have abandoned everyone who wishes to do
native development and (in particular) dumped a lot of
serious developers with the release of vFred, Codegear has
at least paid attention to the real world.

With regard to Vista <sigh>. Nevermind.

Be aware that those who are responsible for the vFred
debacle think they did well. There's a subtle clue in
there.

Dan



"sysrpl" <sysrpl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4851d994$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
With all the negative opinions floating around lately
about Vista and WPF (on the channel 9 forums), I (being a
Delphi user) have been quite pissed about the current
"state of affairs" of the Windows programming community. I
still believe native code and Delphi are where it's at,
but both Borland and Microsoft seem to be doing everything
in their power to kill the community.

Microsoft killed their most loyal developers with the
release of Visual Fred and then took a seven year hiatus
before dumping the Vista turd on everyone's doorstep.

Borland on the other hand has slowly allowed itself to
crumble, continually losing their best talent to other
companies, while stupidly mistreating the best the
developer community had to offer (Hello Peter Morris and
Ray Lischner if you're reading this).

We've all had plenty of time to ponder the problems, and
this thread isn't going to solve anything, but I just
wanted to given one last push to revitalize my (hopefully
our) interest in programming for Windows.

That said, here is my feature request to Microsoft ...

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Microsoft,

GDI+ is a complete failure. It is slow, uses software
rendering (please don't mention Matrox, they aren't an
option in 2008), and doesn't have an officially supported
C interface.

Video here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2ceiKZyGEHE

Microsoft, as per the video above, please get serious and
create a new hardware abstraction API for drawing graphics
to replace the ancient GDI. Put it into the Platform SDK
as a C interface and create some .NET wrappers for it. Use
every means at your disposal to make damn sure hardware
vendors provide accelerated drivers for it.

I know what you're going to say ... we've done that twice
already (GDI+ and WPF) with the last two shipments of
Windows, so the answer is NO!

Well sadly, in my opinion again, WPF is not the answer.
Microsoft you missed the mark twice now. While .NET might
be well suited for enterprise development, it is not a
real choice for commercial software. Commercial
applications (all of the many programs I depend on
everyday such as Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Lightwave,
Firefox, Textpad, and I could go on and on) are and will
remain in the C/C++ realm. This goes doubly so for
intensive graphics applications.

So unto WPF. WPF needlessly ties graphics programming to a
tree model, where everything to be drawn is an object and
added must be added to some kind of drawing surface
collection. It's unintuitive, and step in the wrong
direction.

I want a programming model which has been proven over time
and has worked work well in the past. I expect a C style
graphics API in the vein of ...

Surface.Line(Pen, 10.5, 23.25);

Rather than ...

Line.Stroke = Pen;
Line.StrokeThickness = 2;
Line.X1 = 0;
Line.Y1 = 0;
Line.X2 = 10.5;
Line.X2 = 23.25;
Surface.Add(Line);

What we need is more advanced hardware blitting with blend
modes, direct access to graphics memory, fast and smooth
hardware interpolation of image, stroke, and fill resizing
with antiailising done in hardware. We want layered
graphics output, hardware transforms, and polygon clipping
with spline curves as polygon segments while preserving
strokes and fills.

We don't need a high level markup interface to putting
pixels on the screen. Leave the markup in a control, not
in the API.

Microsoft, please give us a new solid graphics API and
make sure hardware manufacturers support it this time.


.

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