Thanks a lot friends. I continue...
I had studied under the DOS environment and I had got Windows '95 in my new system as my operating environment. Even though it was easy to operate, I could not do any programming. I had so much of works before hand and I was involved in them for about 1 year. It was a Costing project in Excel with about 150 sheets, everything interlinked. It was a nice experience. I had done some macro programming in Excel for introducing thousand's comma according to Indian tradition.
In the year 1998, the computer professional who had programmed for the accounting, invoice processing and payroll processing for our business firm had gone for a better job. We could not create new reports according to the requirements and we had to play only with the old options. Only at that time, I had realized about the importance of Database programming. Having the knowledge of DBase III+ programming, I had started to write small utilities to take self configured reports from the existing tables. I had the reference of the source codes for the existing software. It was done in Clipper Summer '87 version.
There is a saying, 'Necessity is the mother of invention'. Yes. Necessity had driven me to do more and more programming. Actually, I had started staring huge prg files with various do while .not. eof() loops and virtually indefinite nested if ... endif conditions. Once understood, I had the confidence of creating bigger softwares too. So, in addition to the accounting software, I had created order processing and inventory maintenance and integrated the same with the existing project.
It was in the mid, 1998, I could get an internet connection with a dial up modem. In the mean time, I had a dream of using GUI in my programming. I had tried Visual Basic. I could not link with my existing dbf tables and dropped. In the beginning, I misunderstood about OOPS and GUI. Actually I had an allergy over this OOPS, I don't know why even now.
So, I had abandoned my dream
of GUI because of OOPS.
In the year 1999, while searching the net, I had come across a site called
Oasis, a site which had shared source code/libraries for Clipper and many utilities. From that site, I had got an excellent library called
Super. It had some assembly language routines too to capture mouse gestures and enabled Clipper code to be 'RAT'ified. Apart from this mouse functionality, the library had so many small utilities like sorting multiple arrays, finding out Day of the week like that. Actually I had realized about the advantages of Open Source on seeing that library source codes. I had studied in depth, and I had known about optimization of codes, effective memory management, different routes to a same destination in programming etc.
With the SuperLib, I had changed all my projects to be mouse enabled, there by satisfying half of my dreams. However, I could not stop dreaming about creating a full fledged Windows program eliminating the dark DOS command box. As new versions of Windows came in the market, I was afraid that, one day there won't be this DOS Command Box and all my programs would not be useful at all.
I was, why was? even now am, very fond of Open Source. In my system I don't use any copyright protected software except the Windows Operating System. I would list all the open source software I use in a separate thread for all my requirements.
I had found out Harbour from the Oasis site I had already mentioned. I had tested a lot but could not use it because of SuperLib, as it could not be linked with Harbour.
I was in a confused state. I liked Harbour a lot because of its open nature. I could not abandon SuperLib too, since all of my projects were linked with this library. So, I was desperately searching for a GUI library (at least mouse enabled for Harbour).
On one fine day in my life, my search was fruitful.
I could even remember the date. It was 4th of October, 2002, I had downloaded Harbour MiniGUI and could create a window with my limited xBase programming knowledge. Hurray! I could not describe my feelings in words!
Immediately on compiling my hello world prg, I had commented in the yahoo group from where I had downloaded the 0.40 version of the library with the following words,
Dear Roberto,
It is wonderful to use your Harbour Minigui Library, an open
source library for Harbour.
Thank you verymuch for your sincere efforts.
I would like to make a small suggestion regarding text boxes.
Shall you please make provision for right aligning the text boxes
for numeric fields?
Thank you once again.
srgiri
- will be continued with my HMG experience...
Hi rathinagiri,
