WinFBE experience

[James Klutho]

Just a shout out to Jose.  I have been rewriting a major petroleum industry application from the early 2000's using Freebasic  and WinFBE.  This effort is to repent programming sins of a noobie in Powerbasic.  I could have never accomplished what I did do without the wonderful and helpful Powerbasic forum from back then.  I got it to work but boy is it ugly.  I am well beyond retirement age and will never sell this thing but I just wanted to try and do a better job.  This will probably be a couple thousand of hours of programming time if I don't die first. This is the reason I wrote the Grid and Printing app that is present on this forum.  Paul's editor is nice.  Thanks Paul.  Freebasic is a respectable basic and works surprisingly well for an open source project.  Good job to mainly victor1 and dkl but I am sure to a host of others.  It kind of saddens me though that WinFBE is not embraced more by the Freebasic community.  WinFBE is so polished and well documented it is an anomaly in the Freebasic world.  There are some good programmers in the community but everyone is a hobbist.  I see basic dissipating further in the coming years.

Jose, I can't imagine what drives your generosity and perfection but here is thanks from the receiving end of your effort.  WinFBE is wonderful.  Without it and Paul's editor, I would have left Freebasic by now.  I visited Freebasic to dip my toe into linux and GDK/GTK but got frustrated and have been on the periphery of Windows Freebasic for a time now.  I will probably stick around and lurk a little.

Jim

[Paul Squires]

Thanks Jim :-)   Jose's WinFBX is an amazing collection of classes and subs/functions. It surprises me as well that not every Windows FB programmer does not use the library to it's fullest potential. Without it, I'd be lost. It has saved me hundreds of hours of programming effort. Jose is a legend.

[José Roca]

Thanks very much for your kind words.

Currently, my only motivation to do some programming from time to time is to no lose entirely my skills. It is also useful to keep my mind in good shape.

The good thing about FreeBasic is that it you can extend the language using classes. The first one that it was most needed was an unicode dynamic string. I managed to write a full working one, although because some quirks of the compiler I had to use some tricks, like the much hated double indirection (**) to allow to be used with the FB intrinsic functions. Fortunately, the current FB's main developer become interested and made changes to the compiler to allow full integration. Maybe a modified version of it will be distributed in a future version of FB.