Tuesday 20 March 2012

Long time, no posts

Life's been demanding attention, and lots of it. And one thing I've learned about life - when it's trying to get your attention, you better not keep it waiting.

Still, this has not been totally idle time, and there are some lessons learned.

  • Visual C# Express has unacceptable limitations with regards to debugging - e.g., no conditional breakpoints. Yes, I know there are workarounds, but the absence of such a basic feature sounds as a warning - what other features could be missing? I do realize it's free, and I'm getting more than I paid for.
  • I found a few stability issues with MonoDevelop on Win7. I found even more documentation issues, especially regarding Gtk#. I've had to rely on, e.g., Python articles, to get info on Gtk. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying.
  • Working on Windows with anything other than Visual C++ ranges from "slightly painful" to "huge pain". Not because of some inherent VC++'s superior quality, but because many tools/libs/etc supply little to no aid for those who have other IDEs/compilers on Windows. Fortunately, I'm not the first faced with this the problem, nor - even more fortunately - the most knowledgeable.
  • I found Code::Block's settings/configurations more intuitive than Qt Creator's. However, so far I'm having an easier time working with Qt Creator's GUI tool.
  • Getting Qt Creator to work with a newer version of mingw was easier than expected (again, so far). I just added a new tool chain and selected it in the build settings. It was totally non-intuitive that the build settings were accessed by clicking "Projects" on the left-hand bar on the IDE.
  • Building Boost with mingw has been a... learning experience. Then again, isn't everything, after the rage subsides? :) After much wrestling with 1.48, I've finally managed to build it with mingw. I wanted to give boost::filesystem a spin, so no way to avoid building it. Then, 1.49 came out, and I built it again. Or rather, tried to. I've never managed get it successfully with "--build-type=complete". After much collision between head and wall, I've decided (out of desperation) to download the latest mingw (instead of using the one included in Qt Creator) and... voilĂ ! Success on the first attempt.

So, what follows? Well, I'll be trying to build libssh2, so I expect more drama will ensue :)