WinFBE - Good job!

[Eddy Van Esch]

Hi all,

I haven't been following you guys here very closely for some time. But during the Holiday period, I decided to come over again and take a peek.
I haven't been doing that much programming lately, but what I program, I still do in FireFly (with PowerBasic). I absolutely love FireFly!

I downloaded WinFBE and gave it a spin. Looks real nice and it definitely shows Paul dedication and programming skills.
It is not a FireFly clone yet, but I don't know if that is exactly the intention.
My hope is that WinFBE will become a 'FireFly Plus' for FB.

I don't know if Paul has ever revealed in detail his exact plans for WinFBE, or better, what WinFBE will be when it is finished. Maybe he has, but the post is probably buried somewhere in all these threads here....

Anyway, Paul, I would like to thank you for your great work! Not only for WinFBE now, but also for FireFly before, that still continues to give me fun in programming to this day.
After seeing WinFBE in action, I surely will be following things more closely here!!

And best wishes to everyone here for the new year!

Kind regards
Eddy

[Paul Squires]

Hi Eddy, Happy New Year to you as well !

You should strongly consider moving away from FireFly. It is no longer being developed and suffers strongly in the areas of unicode and high dpi resolution support.

WinFBE will have a visual designer that will replace all of the functionality of FireFly and be able to handle the latest Windows systems. The next release (1.8. will see a pretty substantial update to the core WinFBE editor and also the built in visual designer. I am also on holidays and I intend to work on it every day until I go back to work.

Thanks for the compliments - I do appreciate it :-)

[Peter House]

Paul,

Nice.  I downloaded (1.9.0x64), installed and wrote my first freebasic program this morning in about 15 minutes.  I used Powerbasic, Roca, and Firefly (purchased) for several years and have been looking for a replacement.

Questions:
1. Is there a way to switch between code and design using the keyboard?
2. I will be using FB to work with a MQTT server and will be creating a header file to allow the use of the available client library.  I am looking for any pointers or help on how to get started.

Thanks again,

Peter House

[Paul Squires]

Hi Peter,

1. Looks like I haven't built a keyboard accelerator to specifically toggle between code and design. I'll have to add that.
2. A header file should be do-able if one already exists built using C. The translator from C to FB is usually pretty straightforward. Going from C++ or .NET to FB is quite hard.

[Peter House]

Can you point me in the direction where to start on converting C Header files to FB ?

I did this many years ago for some code in VB 3 (?)  I have the header files easily available.

Thanks,

Peter House

PS - I probably should have started a new topic.  Let me know and I will begin a new topic.

[Paul Squires]

Can you point me in the direction where to start on converting C Header files to FB ?

I did this many years ago for some code in VB 3 (?)  I have the header files easily available.

Thanks,

Peter House

PS - I probably should have started a new topic.  Let me know and I will begin a new topic.

Hi Peter, yes start a new topic and post the header file as an attachment if you can. There are several people in this forum that might be able to help. I know that Jose knows a lot about C to FB translation. I know some as well. If the header is not too big then maybe we can all pitch in and get it converted for you quite quickly.

[James Fuller]

Paul,
  Have you tried FbFrog ?
I don't have the link but I have used it in the past to do c ->fb conversions.

James

[José Roca]

It is available in GitHub: https://github.com/dkl/fbfrog

[Paul Squires]

It is available in GitHub: https://github.com/dkl/fbfrog

FYI
If you had tried to compile FBFrog yourself using WinFBE then you would have run into trouble because there was a bug in WinFBE that prevented the compiling of all of the individual *.o object files when creating the FBFrog project. That bug is fixed and I will upload a new version of WinFBE shortly.

[Andrew Lindsay]

Hmm, sorry to bring this back from the dead.  But I've just tried to compile FBFrog and get all sorts of link errors.  Can someone share their working project or hints on how to make it work?

[Paul Squires]

Here is the version that I have on my system. It contains a compiled EXE.

[Andrew Lindsay]

Thanks Paul. I managed to get things working in the end. I had to add all the files as modules. I wasn't aware that unless they were added specifically they were not compiled. I suppose I'm soft from PB programming and not facing to deal with linkers etc during that process 
Andrew