Pelles C Dialog Editor

[leandrojardim]

Hi, I am looking the many enhancements of Pelles C for some time and I love it. I would like to start my carreer programming with it and using it in my personal projects.

Pelles C is ready for finishing small to medium projects like programs dealing with dialogs and graphics? Or better, how it is comparable with the old versions of Visual Studio, (I have very few experience with the old VS but its a good way to know how it progress is going)? What is the priority of Pelle to enhance its dialog editor, mainly in dealing with custom controls, which have very basic support now?

Thanks for everyone that supports this great project.

[CommonTater]

Pretty much everything you should need to write monster sized programs is already there.  Custom controls aren't a big deal since you're basically going to load them only once at the beginning of each project... accumulating them in the toolbar would eventually turn it into another jungle that can't be tamed.

I have no idea what Pelle's priorities are with the Dialog editor (that's for him to say) but it's been basically the same since Version 4 of POIDE.  It's always been perfectly adequate in every project I've done (a couple of hundred by now).

Finally : Comparing Pelles C to Visual Studio is apples and oranges... Pelles C is C-11 ... VS is a proprietary version of C++ and half a dozen other languages. 

[leandrojardim]

Thanks Tater.

For me theres nothing wrong with the Dialog Editor, in reality I love it and I would like to see it grow further with respect to custom controls.

Mainly, in RC2 isnt possible to remove a control from memory without removing it from the form, and while in memory I cant recompile the control source code in another project because of access denied errors.

One think, I dont know if I have seen it from other Dialog Editors, maybe from Microsoft, is to add a simple button for each loaded custom control in the toolbar and remove it with a right mouse button menu option. Buttons with the icon of the "small head" would work perfectly.

[CommonTater]

This is one of those cases where a dialog based program is NOT the way to go. 
 
A far better plan than using the dialog editor to debug your custom controls would be to make a small single window program just for testing the control. Put your control in the middle of a parent window and have the "exerciser" program send and process messages to and from your control, to ensure that all works as expected. 
 
Once it's debugged and working, then you can add it to your dialogs.
 
I'm attaching a sample workspace with my EasySplitter custom control and it's exerciser program to give you some notion of how I go about it...