I miss the good old ANSI C

[techie]

Gone are the days when you could write a "Hello World" program in a few minutes, few kbs of compiled standalone exe and few lines of code.

Today, if I have to write a simple Windows application with a very simple screen, doing some serial comm, I cant find a simple C development environment.

VB6 was a good language. But with DotNet, they have infected it also.

Where can I find a plain C development system that can compile static windows applications without too many overheads.

To summarize, is there a "ANSI C" flavour of VisualBasic 6.0. without the overheads of Visual C++.

 

[btbass]

You can find quite a nice free c/c++ compiler here.

h**p://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html

It is an open source project IDE that supports and uses the GCC compiler, which is a very good and hard to beat compiler.

 

[techie]

I tried that but it is not as straight forward as VB6. For example, there is no tool box to include simple buttons, text boxes and radio buttons.

 

[btbass]

Well, I would sugest Delphi, which is object pascal and is the most productive and easy to use windos rad in exsistance.

Alas, it is the demise of Delphi, Borland are selling the IDE and will no longer develop or support it.

You can download Visual Express C# from Microsoft for free. C# is a very interesting language, it was written by Anders Hejlsberg who wrote Turbo Pascal and Delphi, and is now involved with Microsoft. They lured him away from Borland with 4 million dollars.
So the Microsoft Visual net is about to get good.
C# attempts to take the best bits of c, c++, delphi, theres even some perl in it.

 

[techie]

Is visual c# any easier than Visual c++. I have good knowledge of ANSI C. But have not used C#. Are there
major differences.

 

[btbass]

I like it, I have always found C++ to be a bit overblowted and cryptic.
C# is very much tied to the net framework, but Visual Express is quite a nice ide.
If you know c it is not hard to get into C# and the framework does a lot in the background for you.
A few twists, you dont have header files, you have namespaces, the net framework supports over 60,000 functions, the exe's are tiny, but you need the framework to run the program, you can use pointers, but you seldom have to, converting from one type to another is so easy. It's very cool. There is a serial port you can drop onto your form.
I think it is going to be the preferred language in the future.

 

[techie]

What about license. Is it free to use or also free to deploy. Do the applications need an installer or the apps can run on any platform that has the net framework installed. Also what about the user base. Are many people using it.

 

[btbass]

Yes, suprisingly it is free, you just have to register your copy. I think Microsofts plan is to get people using it. It comes with a nifty install program for deploying your apps. The apps run on any platform that has the net framework installed. The net framework is also OS independant, theoreticly, it can run on any platform that supports net.
There is also a Visual Basic Express and a Visual C++ express for free download.

 

[techie]

I tried the VC# express and liked it very much. I think I am gonna go for it. Have you ever used Sockets for TCP/IP communications in this. I had been using winsock in VB.

Added after 4 hours 59 minutes:

Is Visual C++ Express any simpler than the older version. To put it more simply, for a expert ANSI C programmer not familiar with the OOP part of C++ (classes etc), would it be easier to start VC++ Express or VC# express.