Development Dead-Ends

When creating new features and improvements, it’s inevitable that some just don’t turn out. Maybe it doesn’t work as well as it needs to, or isn’t as effective as hoped, or just plain doesn’t work. You end up with a lot of time invested in a dead-end development wise. I’m used to dealing with these, as they’re unavoidable when you’re attempting new and interesting things.

What does annoy me, however, is spending a day or two purely dealing with Windows/MFC/User-Interface issues. I’ve continued using the MFC framework for one very good and simple reason : it’s what I started the project using. The trap of always upgrading to some new whiz-bang framework is one I’ve avoided, but the flip side of that is having to wade through a host of issues for something simple when it seems on the surface that they should “just work”. Such is the case with using MFC and sending windows messages across threads and DLL boundaries. There’s a whole host of things that have to be correct here, and some of them are the opposite of other necessary design decisions.

I’ve long wanted a new GUI framework for WM. That’s not going to happen for many reasons — the creation of such a beast is at a minimum many months’ work of essentially re-creating the wheel, time that I don’t have to spend right now. But sometimes, dealing with stuff like the above, I really want to. 🙂