DDE Question

Does the DDE come with an IDE, or is one needed to be downloaded ?

The DDE gives you various apps, each with a specific purpose. For example, you get SrcEdit for writing code, ResEd for creating your UI, DDT for debugging. It doesn’t have an integrated environment like, say, Visual Studio.

It’s not too bad once you get the hang of it though :)

Having used Visual Studio for some years, I came to wonder how useful an IDE really is. What I needed most of the time was an editor window. The space taken up by the other panes of the VS window simply detracted from the visible text area. I didn’t need the Output pane until I built something. And that’s exactly what happens with the RISC OS DDE – it’s non-existent until build time.

The persistent niggle with the DDE is that, on completion of any build, you have to close either one or two windows, depending on whether there have been any errors or warnings. It would be cute to have a single button or keystroke to close it/them.

A tabbed editor window was useful until the tabs would no longer fit in the available width, whereupon it suddenly became a liability.

And using Visual Studio with Visual Basic, let me also add:

• The editor, which is fixed, tends to like to format code how it prefers, and has minimal code colouring options.
  The DDE, on the other hand, doesn’t care what editor you use. Edit, SrcEdit, StrongEd, Zap…all work, though some are nicer than others.

• Code completion is useful when navigating complicated structures, however on several occasions I have found if I type in a variable with incorrect case, it won’t go and correct this for me. Instead it will apply the modification to all other instances of that variable – which is absolutely brainedead.
  Sometimes simplicity is a benefit. I know my way around Wimp structures way better than anything in VB because I have to remember them, there’s no fancy help. But then familiarity brings experience.

• And one aimed at Visual Studio itself: any use of “callbacks” (I forget the MS term but it is something dumb) are neither detected nor are tidied up by the IDE when running the code in run/debug mode. So if you use some features of the Windows API, such as the SysTray Notification Area and you stop a program using the stop button instead of a full program exit, expect the entire IDE to blow up imminently (certainly the moment anything affects the tray icon).
  RISC OS would no doubt be the same if we had an IDE that failed to notice event claims, only we don’t have a fancy IDE so… ;-)

SysTray Notification Area

I can’t help but think that that was directed at me! :P

I have found if I type in a variable with incorrect case, it won’t go and correct this for me

Fortunately it doesn’t do this in C#, but from memory you typically use VB 6 rather than the .Net ones. And that’s fine; VB 6 is still supported by Microsoft!

Thanks for that!

A good IDE is a major time saver. Support for refactorings, integrated debugger, code completion, managing everything wrt your favourite VCS, context searching, code analysis plugins, showing compile errors without needing to compile, code navigation, automatic code creation, automatic template creation e.g. for documentation…

RISC OS development on RISC OS is firmly stuck in the 80s, when syntax colouring was the only help a developer could get. My recommendation is to use an IDE on a different system and use GCCSDK to cross-compile your stuff, putting the resulting binaries via Moonfish onto the RISC OS platform to run it. Another advantage of this setup: if RISC OS crashes, you can continue developing while rebooting the RISC OS machine.

If you want to use the DDE, do the same, just editing the sources via Moonfish and build the software on RISC OS.

The editor, which is fixed, tends to like to format code how it prefers, and has minimal code colouring options.

It does? Visual Studio has a bewildering array of formatting options, meaning that so far I’ve not found a coding style that it can’t be made to autoformat correctly given ten minutes spent configuring it.

on several occasions I have found if I type in a variable with incorrect case, it won’t go and correct this for me. Instead it will apply the modification to all other instances of that variable – which is absolutely brainedead.

It was, indeed, braindead. However, it hasn’t done this for at least ten years, has it?

And one aimed at Visual Studio itself: any use of “callbacks” (I forget the MS term but it is something dumb) are neither detected nor are tidied up by the IDE when running the code in run/debug mode.

Again, is this true for current versions? The term you’re thinking of is “events”, I think.

What I needed most of the time was an editor window. The space taken up by the other panes of the VS window simply detracted from the visible text area. I didn’t need the Output pane until I built something. And that’s exactly what happens with the RISC OS DDE – it’s non-existent until build time.

Again, this is how recent (ie. last ten years) versions of Visual Studio work. Different panes can be displayed in different modes, so it’s quite possible to have the build/debug output pane only appear when building or debugging. Drop out of debug and back into edit, and the pane closes.

The persistent niggle with the DDE is that, on completion of any build, you have to close either one or two windows, depending on whether there have been any errors or warnings. It would be cute to have a single button or keystroke to close it/them.

Given the above-mentioned functionality, that happens for free in Visual Studio, of course.

RISC OS development on RISC OS is firmly stuck in the 80s, when syntax colouring was the only help a developer could get. My recommendation is to use an IDE on a different system and use GCCSDK to cross-compile your stuff, putting the resulting binaries via Moonfish onto the RISC OS platform to run it. Another advantage of this setup: if RISC OS crashes, you can continue developing while rebooting the RISC OS machine.

This. As a regular Visual Studio user, I really miss that integration when developing for RISC OS. That said, I’ve yet to find a useful standalone IDE that works well with the GCCSDK on Linux – any recommendations?

I use Eclipse with the GNAT plugin, so I cannot use GCCSDK for final compilation, but must use GNAT on RISC OS. Not the optimal setup, but the most productive currently possible.

I use Eclipse at work, but for Java development. So it was a natural choice. However, Eclipse for C and C++ is a lot less well integrated with the compiler last time I used it (to develop/compile RPCEmu – even the Mercurial plugin was at its infancies back then).

I feel the need to plug Sourcery

I realise it’s not an IDE like Eclipse (I use Eclipse every day), but it’s an attempt to make things a bit easier if you do want to do your development on RISC OS.

By the way, does the DDE compile faster than GCC? It is extremely slow using an emulator…

Yes, the DDE is faster.