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>Well, some food for thought reading last years posts on Mysnip: mixture of good, bad and ugly ;-)

Well like any language there will be positive and negative, that is natural. However, what I have found on the mysnip forum particularly is that there are a number of ex-Clarion developers and many of them seem to not be able to leave the Clarion way of doing things and move onto the WinDev way of doing things. So they want WinDev to be Clarion ... well then they should stay with Clarion. It's like me complaining about WinDev because its not exactly like VFP ... ?

>Some worries about the mentioning of bugs carried forward through many WDev iterations and Hyperfile SQL being not conformant to SQL92 specs (some missing, some just wrong)

iro the bugs - well, yes, I suppose any language that has thousands of functions and commands and such an extensive suite of tools and options must have bugs. VFP has many bugs, just ask Fabio :), and yet we (the VFP community) have managed to develop many apps for many years that are great and service our clients. Bugs can be worked around. I would also like to mention 3 things;

1) A year or so ago I was assured by the PCSoft tech support that a particular feature relating to reading and writing VFP DBF/CDX fields was operational. When I found out it wasn't I was asked to produce proof via re-pro code, which I did. And they gave me a fixed DLL within a week. Who am I to them? Nobody, but I got that fix asap.

2) Many times we are so sure that it is a bug only to find out it was us, our ignorance. Just 2 days ago I was 100% sure I had found a bug, I had re-pro code, everything. I was about to send their tech support a complaint and then it hit me, after hours of trying, that it was my fault after all. Perhaps another programmer would have hit send on the email or posted a "bug" to a public forum. This is not to say there are no bugs, I am sure there are. But, see point 3 ...

3) I have spoken to 3 companies who are WInDev developers/experts. The one is a French company and employs 15 programmers and they cannot handle the volume of WinDev work they get. They are churning out real-world applications, running a real business, servicing clients around the world, making real money. Another one sells a veterinarians management and admin system in Belgium and is the biggest provider of such software with hundreds of sites across the country, all done in WinDev. These companies have nothing to sell me, nothing to convince me of and they say the same thing; yes there are bugs, so what? We work around them for now, report them to PCSoft and they get fixed in due course. Is VFP any different?

iro HyperFile adhering to SQL92, I don't know. HyperFile is their internal database and one is free to connect to Oracle or MS SQL or Postgres or whatever instead. I guess a quick email to their support will reveal this issue one way or another. For me the HyperFile database works great and makes my transition from the VFP way to the WinDev way very easy.


>>The documentation is excellent and very extensive. Almost every function and command has examples included plus a "Also See" button which leads from one topic to the other. It is very well laid out and quite easy to find things. WinDev also comes with hands-on tutorials which one should follow as complete as possible. It will take a week. Thereafter the documentation becomes a great learning tool.
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>Ack

What? :) I like documentation - its a great source of learning for me!


>Found oodles of French Youtube sessions: why don't they translate them ? Should be cost efficient...

I think because their English exposure is only in the last few years starting to really take off so perhaps they will focus more on this going forward, I don't know.


>>One specific point I shall mention here; WinDev uses the concept of an "analysis". This is a plan or specification of the databases your application will use. You design the tables, fields, and indexes. And then visually connect the tables with rules and triggers in a flow diagram style. You must create the analysis if your application will use any databases. Initially I didn't get it but then I realized how powerful this is. It is with the analysis that WinDev can, amongst other things,
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>Seems to be a Datadictionary on steroids - which is a solution I really favor. Still, some threads about analysis getting borked and needed to be recreated/resynched make me wonder. Will have to look at that especially - any way to work over an analysis with a builder or something similar ? Export/Import of finished analysis into SQL, XML or PDF ? Options to working together/integrate with dedicated DD like Toad, xCase SqlModeler, DeSigner ?

Look, the analysis is stored in a file. If you corrupt the file then you have a problem. Is this any different from screwing up your project file? No, it is the same. Make some backups. WinDev also has built in project backup/restore - at a click of a button it will backup your entire project, zip it up, date stamp the zip file, and you are done. Plus, if you crash WinDev, the first thing it does when you restart it is to offer to check and rebuild your project and related files. Surely we are all past relying on hope as a backup strategy :) Furthermore, WinDev comes with built in Source Code Manager (SCM) and group developer environment for managing multiple developers working on the same project. If you don't make backups as a developer or make use of the tools to help save your work, well then, you deserve to lose it.


>Is their OOP class classical ot more prototypal (vfp is in between: for instance evaluating "class properties" to a prototype gained from first instance, or the ability to addproperty() or create objects dynamically via gather. In Python and JS even methods can be monkeypatched : does WDEV language support this ? SI or MI ?

You have the ability to define classes visually (they call these classes or templates) and I also programmatically and, I thnk, to be able to re-define classes in code with functions similar to AddProperty(). But this last avenue I don't use even in VFP so I cannot say for certain that it is in WinDev - I am sure the online help documentation will reveal it <gr&d>