>>>>Hey Nancy! Long time. You still packin' a trout?:-)
>>>
>>>Hey, George. Hopefully I'll be a round to torment y'all for a while.
>>
>>Great! Careful, folks (especially newbies). There's a reason why Nancy is sometimes referred to as "The Fish Lady".< g >
>
>Nah, it's not newbies I enjoy taking on. < g >

I didn't mean VFP newbies, I meant UT newbies.< s >

>>>>Yeah it can be a real PITA. This, however, is where the proper programming documentation can be a life-saver.
>>>>
>>>>Having said, I should note that I'm in the midst of reading "Code Complete" for the first time.< vbg >
>>>
>>>Hey, I'm in the midst of reading that for the first time all the time. ;-)
>>
>>I just got it. Been trying for five years. After that one, it's on to "Rapid Development" by the same author.
>
>Haven't got that one, but I do read Software Project Survival Guide.
>
>>BTW, I'm *sigh* learning PowerBuilder 6.5. Talk about a PITA trying find stuff, sheesh! I'm thinking of suing because my civil rights are being violated by the thing. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment...
>
>Poor thing. I knew one guy, exactly one guy, once who used Powerbuilder. He seemed to like it well enough, tho that was, oh god, 10 years ago?

Well, the first thing you have to get used to is "The IDE From Hell". It's inconsistent, you can only have one code window open at a time, there's no property sheet (as we know it), etc., etc. etc.

Then there's the Powerbuilder Foundation Class (PFC). Since it (like Sybase) is designed to be a multi-platform development environment there's a lot of platform checking code. Further, all windows are descendants of pfc_w_master. This leads to a heirachy that 4 or 5 level deep before you even get to the last child. Naturally, "The IDE From Hell" makes it impossible to easily determine which of the events and methods actually have code.

Next, we have the DataWindow, which PB programmers swear by. For me, I swear at it. A typical PB app uses the same datawindow for input and output. "Hello, can anyone say 'lack of functional cohesion'?" No one around here seems to know how to add a subclassed object on it (even though, from what I've seen it can be done). Now this means that globally changing something as simple as making sure that all inputs are in upper case is a nightmare.

Finally, it seems that in order to do proper sub-classing of objects, you create a user object (similar to a custom class) and inherit from the base. Of course, this means that it's impossible to tell a user object text box from a user object label because it's a user object and has that icon.

I think I've done a rather roundish circle here because I'm back to "The IDE From Hell".