Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Its basically a mode flag, which when turned on, triggers, 
>> "show_grab_handles", and, "disable_control", or something like the 
>> second one. 
> 
> I see.  That's kind of what I thought. I thought you were talking about 
> the control doing something in the IDE, rather than the IDE driving the 
> control.
> 
>> Mind, a lot of this got easier with .NET, 
> 
> Yes. I never got into the design mode of COM stuff.
> 
Yeah. Wish I hadn't. Wasted a lot of time trying to solve something that 
just wasn't obviously solvable. Mind, I am sure you could work it out 
with enough time to play with IDispatch, but I was looking to the 
concrete example. I had wanted to design something that would allow you 
to make a layout for a window, then export the settings to XML, and 
later "reload" it. This would allow someone to make an importable layout 
for different games, which could even be sent over on the fly, as 
needed. The point was to avoid the overhead of needing the compiler 
suite to make the layout, or worse, having to use something like IE to 
"load" script and layout, when the client in question already had its 
own, far more efficient, script system, and just lacked access to a way 
to create custom windows.

Since then, some of these features have been added, but they are far 
more limited than they would have been if you could have just plugged in 
*any* control you wanted, instead of being limited only to those already 
supported (which may be faster than COM, but adds more code and overhead 
*in* the client itself).

The other issue we ran into was working out how to pull and IE and link 
in such controls dynamically, so they didn't have to be "predefined", 
and the client could pass on events from the attached control to the 
script system. That is documented... sort of. The only example shows 
using "one" control, in a very limited instance, doesn't go into detail 
on any other aspects, and gives no example of how to properly handle 
multiple copies of the control, *nor* several different controls. Sort 
of a, "this is how to park your car in a single space, but not in a 
crowded parking lot." In principle, someone with more understanding 
could have worked it out. I didn't even have a "current" version of the 
compiler to work with, which supported the API I needed. :p

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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