Windows UI summer of code project

[Timothy Waterhouse]

Gregor,
Just to throw my two cents in, the document/view model is simply for
separating out the data from the UI and can be ignored completely if you so
wish (there's even an option when making a new project to disable it).  I
think MFC would be hugely useful for improving development time with almost
no real performance overhead because it contains classes for all the common
tasks.  Best of all, you can use the UI designer which uses components
wrapped in MFC classes (just make sure when you make your project you make
it as a dialog based application).  The biggest thing to remember when
you're working on the project is that you won't be maintaining it forever
and it needs to be in a state where others can easily (or as easily as
possible) maintain it and make changes.

Plus, who really wants to deal with writing a message pump and all the mess
associated with? (ok, I do, I love writing win32 apps from ASM) :-)

FYI: I'm not a contributor nor a decision maker with pidgin, I just figured
I'd throw my two cents in from my experience with Windows programming.  Feel
free to ignore me/this e-mail.

-Tim (CaffineeHacker on irc)

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Gregor Dick <igregord at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Mark Doliner wrote:
> > This year we accepted TWO students to work on a better/native Windows
> > user interface for libpurple.  It's not decided what these projects
> > entail exactly, nor if/how these two students should interact.  I know
> > I'm opening a can of worms here, but I think it's probably a good idea
> > for us to talk about what we'd like to see from these projects.  The
> > language and drawing toolkit are the biggest decisions.  Wade proposed
> > using either .NET or XULRunner with the possibility of also comparing
> > against MFC, and Gregor proposed using straight up win32 api.
>
> [snip]
>
> > It sounds like Wade and Gregor might not have very overlapping
> > experience with Windows UI toolkits.  Gregor, are you very familiar
> > with MFC or .NET?  Wade, are you very familiar with win32 or MFC?  If
> > not then it seems like it makes the most sense for the two students to
> > work independently, with Gregor using win32 and Wade using .NET (or
> > maybe XUL or MFC).
>
> Firstly, thank you for accepting my proposal. I'm grateful for the
> opportunity to devote the summer to the project and am really looking
> forward to it.
>
> My initial feeling is that it would be best for the two projects to run
> separately. I have some familiarity with .NET, but not enough, I think,
> to attempt something like this in the proposed timescale.
>
> Having two parallel projects, at least for the duration of the summer,
> is perhaps no bad thing. Building a front-end collaboratively from
> scratch might be awkward, but would be more feasible once the
> foundations have been established. Come the end of SoC, a certain amount
> of cross-pollenation of design principles could be useful, and then
> either or both projects could be continued according to developer time
> and will, both SoC-students and otherwise.
>
> As regards the MFC, I'm not sure that it's really appropriate for the
> task. It's a bit more than just a wrapper for the Win32 API, and a lot
> of its functionality is geared towards 'productivity'-type apps, with
> its Document/View model. Also, I have scarcely worked with it myself;
> Wade, do you have a clearer idea of how using the MFC might work out?
>
> -Gregor Dick
>
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