Manifold Community Site: Future of forms on 64-bit?

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

Mike Pelletier — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:23:57 GMT

What is the future of support for forms in 64-bit? The manual says that one of limitations of Manifold 64-bit is: "No common ActiveX controls for forms. The Manifold ActiveX control works OK and may be used by programmers."

Is this a case of waiting on Microsoft to update ActiveX for 64-bit or something else? Any time frames for having forms working on 64-bit?

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

adamw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:27:39 GMT

The future of forms in general and 64-bit forms in particular is .NET and Windows Forms, not ActiveX controls.

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

Mike Pelletier — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:49:39 GMT

Thanks Adam but being a baby programmer I don't understand the implications. Any idea when forms might work in Manifold and will the forms I'm making now need to be reconstructed?

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

adamw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:52:39 GMT

If you can, move to .NET forms. If you can't, there will be a migration path for you and, yes, you will have to reconstruct your forms with us helping as best as we can. No word regarding the dates.

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

Mike Pelletier — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:54:13 GMT

Thank you kindly

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

adamw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:55:16 GMT

This is an example of a Manifold script creating a .NET form.

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

dmbrubac — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:48:09 GMT

Does that imply a replacement for the ActiveX control in the not-to-distant future?

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

adamw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:50:17 GMT

It means that at some point we will add an analogous Windows Forms control.

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

Lorne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:05:34 GMT

What about debugging Adam? Is there any chance that debugging could be built-in as well?

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

adamw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:07:31 GMT

You mean the debugging of .NET scripts (and forms) built-in into Manifold? This is in the plans but not in the near ones. In the meantime, we are looking for ways to better interact with Visual Studio .NET.

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

Mike Pelletier — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:15:53 GMT

"looking for ways to better interact with Visual Studio .NET"

That would be great as all the reading in this forum and in the manual seems to point that using Visual Studio is the best way to go. I installed it and couldn't really figure out how to make it useful and so I've fallen back into doing my work in VBScript. Is there any recommended reading or maybe there are some simple pointers for when getting started?

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

KlausDE — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:59:22 GMT

It takes some time to watch and follow Microsofts introductory videos on VB .NET or C# but they get you going. MSDN is full of examples.

In VBScript and VBA there a reserved names for functions called when an event is thrown. In .NET you have to show the system with function should digest with event (similar to avenues dialog designer extension, in case you know). This was the first majore step I had to learn. Manifold's add-in example is not the worst because you know about the rest.

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

AR_Rick — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:38:54 GMT

As hax0r as this is, I've found most of my problems can be "debugged" by wrapping my entire script in a try/catch with it dumping exceptions and their related stack into a MessageBox. I just do this as SOP now. Of course, you don't get breakpoints or watches or anything cute like that, but these are of limited appeal.

RE: Future of forms on 64-bit?

Lorne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:40:16 GMT

Yes, that is what I was getting at and thanks for the answer Adam.