CompuServe Messages

No, of course I don't mind. Specially when I don't have a clue what I'm talking about. <g> Regardless what they do or how they implement, writing in NT is a breeze compared to the nightmarish development environment available for PharLap. I can put together any interface for Win/Nt in a couple of minutes of work using a ton of different tools available. If you've noticed my recent IPAS work, you will see I gave up all together using the IPAS library's dialog functions. I wrote my own GUI library which is nothing more than a subset of the Win GDI. Contention? Welcome to the multithreaded, multitasking world. All my data structures are isolated. I've been doing my own context switching for quite some time (multitasking under PharLap). Note that my background is low level drivers running in such environments so it's sort of second nature to me to treat all data as "contention prone". I guess the best of all worlds would be both: an IPAS interface and a PlugIn interface. It is somewhat simple to implement the old style IPAS call structure so people could just recompile their code. I can only dream about the NEW plugin architecture. Can you image all the possibilities of an open ended DLL interface? Doing anything you feel like? Concurrently? How about distributed processing, remote procedure calls, etc. Network rendering at its best. Imagine being able to have Photoshop up and running with your texture map, as you swoosh here and there, the 3D scene is automatically rendered. Or how about running some wild formulas using Excel and having the keys in the keyframer updated in real time (Ed Kelerman will go berserk with this one). Scripting language? Can you imagine what people would do with a Visual Basic VBX able to act directly on 3DS? Now… what I really can't wait is to get my hands on a DEC Alpha/4 (1.2 GHz + 2G RAM)….